I enjoy a good read, especially just before I go to sleep at night. My normal routine alternates fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Right now I’m into one of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. It struck me last night that this must be the third time I have read this work, and I started to reflect on why that might be so.
It is a very uneven work, some parts of which I find rather confusing. Where you have a character commenting on the content of a diary which has already been altered by somebody making marginal notes in it, I am not always certain where we are in the successive layers of inverted commas! The characters are all pretty eccentric, if not downright weird, by any standards, but this is probably a part of the attraction. Set in the city of Alexandria between the wars, however, Durrell does succeed in creating a world which is fascinating in its alien customs and culture. I believe that it is that sense of being introduced to another world of human experience which makes it so engaging.
My first encounter with Durrell was as an undergraduate at Leicester …. probably in 1962. A fellow student assured me that I wouldn’t like it, probably on the grounds that she thought I was pretty strait-laced. Little did she know!
I was thinking this morning about my devotion to other specific works of fiction, which I re-read. The piece to which I have the greatest attachment is Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm. Heaven only knows how often I have read that! In this case, however, I do know why I find it so attractive. It is because I have a profound degree of identification with her central character, Flora Post. Finding herself in receipt of a very small inheritance on which it is impossible to live, Flora moves in with distant relatives in their Sussex farm, making herself diffusely useful, but with a mission to tidy them up. There are echoes of my own experience here, with my feeling of having a mission to tidy up members of my own family. (Unlike Flora, I never succeeded!)
There is a point to all of this. This afternoon I fell to wondering just why it might be that I have a sense of affinity with the work of particular painters. It is a puzzling question. After all, what is it about the work of Stanley Spencer that holds my interest? I shall have to ponder that one.