ABSTRACT
Mr. Durrell has been producing a 'word-continuum', 'a four-decker novel whose form is based on the relativity proposition'. Mr. Durrell frequently writes with a genuinely mediterranean clarity and colour, but he cannot always be lucky, and in the descriptive and in the gnomic he frequently fails. There is a numerous class of novelists Mr. Pinfold, though not Mr. Waugh, belonged to it which is 'notable for elegance and variety of contrivance', and to which we owe gratitude for its evincing 'so much will and ability to please'. Mr. Durrell's tetralogy, and it may be possible to take a few inadequate, merely three-dimensional, bearings; always remembering that in the nature of the case these can be only relatively true, and that Mr. Durrell's is a work which sets out, like all Romantic art, to disarm this kind of inquiry. The tetralogy is a highly erotic work Clea, though comparatively simple and changed in tone, is here at one with its predecessors.
