The Black Book

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“My dear fellow, you must come down to my rooms on Tuesday and meet Gracie. I’m giving a little party for her. You must come. I’m sure you will be great friends. She spits blood.”

Just as it would be hard to visit the Gaudí cathedral and write about stone, it’s impossible for me to write an academic introduction to The Black Book. Not that it shouldn’t be dissected — such a rich source of literary samples, it should — but I can’t get off the ride long enough to do it. If I knew where the button was to stop this book, I would try it. As it is, I can only sketch you a door, really a floodgate, to the most exhilarating surge of language, style, and sordid English manners you might ever see in literature.

I hope it doesn’t stain usto say, and I hope I don’t speak only for myself, that if we’ve opened this book we’re likely to have spent at least one teeming night trading starlightfor squalor, or at least one romantic liaison failing badly to harmonise the truths of the flesh with songs about honey. That taste of joyful degradation is why the book you are about to enter was banned in Britain for nearly four decades; surely not helped by the glee with which Lawrence Durrell romped through such unspeakables of his time.

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