Plot summary
The character Marlowe is stranded in Brindisi during political strife in Greece, and he is eventually conveyed to Mavrodaphne by the boatman Christ who serves Rumanades, a highly successful businessman who owns Mavrodaphne. He is a disillusioned schoolteacher akin to Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall. Shortly after arriving on the island, he meets Gordon and Walsh, both characters from Durrell's Pied Piper of Lovers.
In the third chapter, Rumanades' personal history is narrated, leading up through his display of fireworks on Mavrodaphne. This includes his capitalist successes and his acquisition of his fortune, as well as his failed marriage that his wealth could not control.
The fourth and fifth chapters have Marlowe moving into one of Rumanades' villas on the island and meeting the remaining characters, Francis and Fonvisin. The narrative then turns to Marlowe's interests in Quietism.
The subsequent chapters focus heavily on the individual characters in their own narratives: Walsh, Fonvisin, and Francis.
Returning to the present moment on Mavrodaphne, the tenth chapter, "The Music," narrates a gramophone concert leading to an evening spent on a high cliff, with Francis, Marlowe, and Walsh in conversation.
Marlowe then begins to write his treatise on Quietism, and Francis is called away from the island back to London, for which she is given a farewell celebration. However, before she can leave, Rumanades dies of a fever brought on by an evening spent in poor weather thinking of his lost wife. One of the priests dies on the same night, and this throws the small community of expatriates into turmoil as they must vacate the island, putting an end to their escape from financial crises, revolution, and the impending World War.
The Scene
The novel is set on a fictional Greek island named Mavrodaphne, after the black grapes and wine of Patras. On the island, a group of expatriates from primarily Britain and Russia are enjoying the titular spring, and each chapter is written from a different character's perspective, giving his or her history leading up to their arrival on the island. Other chapters, "The Music" in particular, are set in the present on the island. The narrative style and allusive references are unique to each chapter, giving each its own stylistic independence and demonstrating Durrell's exploration of a variety of modernist modes. The chapter "Walsh" continues from Durrell's previous novel Pied Piper of Lovers.
The novel frequently alludes to the political turmoil in Germany, with reference the Berlin Olympics, as well as financial crises in the world and Greek political unrest. The character Gordon, who is in Durrell's 1935 novel Pied Piper of Lovers, is echoed George Orwell's 1936 novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and both he and Francis in Panic Spring echo Orwell, rounding out the series of references. [1]
The novel also emphasises the rural life of the village and a collaborative community of exiles who have no apparent need for money or government. This is set against remembrances of the city, London, financial dependency and despair, and political unrest.
Lawrence George Durrell was an expatriate British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer. He was the eldest brother of naturalist and writer Gerald Durrell.
Gerald Malcolm Durrell was a British naturalist, writer, zookeeper, conservationist, and television presenter. He was born in Jamshedpur in British India, and moved to England when his father died in 1928. In 1935 the family moved to Corfu, and stayed there for four years, before the outbreak of World War II forced them to return to the UK. In 1946 he received an inheritance from his father's will that he used to fund animal-collecting trips to the British Cameroons and British Guiana. He married Jacquie Rasen in 1949; they had very little money, and she persuaded him to write an account of his first trip to the Cameroons. The result, titled The Overloaded Ark, sold well, and he began writing accounts of his other trips. An expedition to Argentina and Paraguay followed in 1953, and three years later he published My Family and Other Animals, an account of his years in Corfu. It became a bestseller.
Philip Marlowe is a fictional character created by Raymond Chandler who was characteristic of the hardboiled crime fiction genre. The genre originated in the 1920s, notably in Black Mask magazine, in which Dashiell Hammett's The Continental Op and Sam Spade first appeared. Marlowe first appeared under that name in The Big Sleep, published in 1939. Chandler's early short stories, published in pulp magazines such as Black Mask and Dime Detective, featured similar characters with names like "Carmady" and "John Dalmas", starting in 1933.
My Family and Other Animals (1956) is an autobiographical book by British naturalist Gerald Durrell. It tells in an exaggerated and sometimes fictionalised way of the years that he lived as a child with his siblings and widowed mother on the Greek island of Corfu between 1935 and 1939. It describes the life of the Durrell family in a humorous manner, and explores the fauna of the island. It is the first and most well-known of Durrell's Corfu trilogy, which also includes Birds, Beasts, and Relatives (1969) and The Garden of the Gods (1978).
The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents is a children's fantasy novel by British writer Terry Pratchett, published by Doubleday in 2001. It is the twenty-eighth novel in the Discworld series and the first written for children. The story is a new take on the German fairy tale about the Pied Piper of Hamelin and a parody of the folk tale genre.
Playback is a novel by American-British writer Raymond Chandler featuring the private detective Philip Marlowe. It was first published in Britain in July 1958; the US edition followed in October that year. Chandler died the following year; Playback is his last completed novel.
Margaret Isabel Mabel "Margo" Durrell was the younger sister of novelist Lawrence Durrell and elder sister of naturalist, author, and TV presenter Gerald Durrell, who lampoons her character in his Corfu trilogy of novels: My Family and Other Animals, Birds, Beasts and Relatives, and The Garden of the Gods.
Theodore Philip Stephanides was a Greek-British doctor and polymath, best remembered as the friend and mentor of Gerald Durrell. He was also known as a naturalist, biologist, astronomer, poet, writer and translator.
Justine, published in 1957, is the first volume in Lawrence Durrell's literary tetralogy, The Alexandria Quartet. The tetralogy consists of four interlocking novels, each of which recounts various aspects of a complex story of passion and deception from differing points of view. The quartet is set in the Egyptian city of Alexandria in the 1930s and 1940s. The city itself is described by Durrell as becoming as much of a complex character as the human protagonists of the novels. Since first becoming available to the public and reviewers in 1957, Justine has inspired what has been called "an almost religious devotion among readers and critics alike." It was adapted into the film of the same name in 1969.
Ex-Mutants was a comic book series created by writer David Lawrence and artist Ron Lim, along with comics packager David Campiti in 1986. It was first published by Eternity Comics and then Amazing Comics, Pied Piper Comics, and finally Malibu/Eternity. Malibu created a shared universe called Shattered Earth with the characters. In 1992, Malibu comics rebooted the franchise with a new continuity. A video game for the Sega Genesis based on the rebooted version was released in 1992, being developed by Malibu Interactive and published by Sega of America, Inc.
Poodle Springs is the eighth Philip Marlowe novel. It was started in 1958 by Raymond Chandler, who left it unfinished at his death in 1959. The four chapters he had completed, which bore the working title The Poodle Springs Story, were subsequently published in Raymond Chandler Speaking (1962), a collection of excerpts from letters and unpublished writings. In 1988, on the occasion of the centenary of Chandler's birth, the crime writer Robert B. Parker was asked by the estate of Raymond Chandler to complete the novel.
Loxwood is a small village and civil parish with several outlying settlements, in the Chichester district of West Sussex, England, within the Low Weald. The Wey and Arun Canal passes to the East and South of the village. This Civil Parish is at the centre of an excellent network of bridleways and footpaths crossing the Low Weald and joining with those in adjacent Counties.
Bitter Lemons is an autobiographical work by writer Lawrence Durrell, describing the three years (1953–1956) he spent on the island of Cyprus. The book was awarded the Duff Cooper Prize for 1957, the second year the prize was awarded.
Pied Piper of Lovers, published in 1935, is Lawrence Durrell's first novel. The novel is in large part autobiographical and focuses on the protagonist's childhood in India and maturation in London. It is followed by Panic Spring, which partly continues the actions of its characters.
Monsieur, or The Prince of Darkness (1974), is the first volume in Lawrence Durrell's The Avignon Quintet. Published from 1974 to 1985, this sequence of five interrelated novels explore the lives of a group of Europeans before, during, and after World War II. Durrell uses many of the experimental techniques of metafiction that he had integrated into his Alexandria Quartet, published 1957 to 1960. He described the later quintet as a quincunx.
Balthazar, published in 1958, is the second volume in The Alexandria Quartet series by British author Lawrence Durrell. Set in Alexandria, Egypt, around World War II, the four novels tell essentially the same story from different points of view and come to a conclusion in Clea. Balthazar is the first novel in the series that presents a competing narrator, Balthazar, who writes back to the narrating Darley in his "great interlinear".
Livia, or Buried Alive (1978), is the second volume in British author Lawrence Durrell's The Avignon Quintet, published from 1974 to 1985. Durrell has described the novels as "roped together like climbers on a rockface, but all independent. .. a series of books through which the same characters move for all the world as if to illustrate the notion of reincarnation." The description of this form for the quintet actually appears in Livia. The first novel of the quincunx, Monsieur, received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1974.
A pentalogy is a compound literary or narrative work that is explicitly divided into five parts. Although modern use of the word implies both that the parts are reasonably self-contained and that the structure was intended by the author, historically, neither was necessarily true: in fact, a pentalogia could be assembled by a later editor, just as Plotinus's Enneads were arranged in nines by Porphyry in order to create an overarching structure of six which would express the idea of perfection.
The Colossus of Maroussi is an impressionist travelogue by American writer Henry Miller that was first published in 1941 by Colt Press of San Francisco. Set in pre-Second World War Greece of 1939, it is ostensibly an exploration of the "Colossus" of the title, George Katsimbalis, a poet and raconteur. The work is frequently heralded as Miller's best.
Maria-Aspasia (Marie) Aspioti, was a distinguished Corfiote writer, playwright, poet, magazine publisher and cultural figure who influenced the literary and cultural life of post-war Corfu. She published the magazine Prosperos between the years 1949–1954, and Lear's Corfu in 1965. She was a close friend of Lawrence Durrell and had been awarded an MBE.
