One of a number of Durrell reissues, this book's elegiac reconstruction of 1950s Cyprus blends a painter's eye for light and landscape with a novelist's feel for character, pace and dialogue. If you're seeking an unbiased overview or even an explanation of Cypriot basics, you'll need to go elsewhere; Durrell is steeped in Greek culture, and his constant (and apparently casual) application of negative imagery to the Turkish side of the equation is quite shocking, while if you don't know that Enosis is the Greek Cypriot aspiration to union with Greece, he certainly won't tell you. What he's really good on, though, is the paralysing stasis of the British colonial administration, whose bumbling bureaucrats he decimates with languid ease. "They must have read my letters with knotted brows in London for there was not one which did not appeal for something to be sent to me by air. By air! I might as well have addressed love-letters to the Dalai Lama . . . " Today's overheated travel writers could learn a great deal from Durrell's consummately stylish approach.
