During the early part of June, 1947, a small party of sightseers found itself trapped in what was then the newly discovered labyrinth of Cefalû, in the island of Crete. They had penetrated the network of caves and corridors with a guide from a tourist agency, their intention being to examine the so-called ‘City in the Rock’ – whose discovery early in the preceding year had set a seal upon the long archaeological career of Sir Juan Axelos. By a sudden and unforeseen accident, the guide in charge of the party was killed. Falls of rock separated several members of the party from the main body, and it was only the sheerest chance that led one of them, Lord Graecen, to find his own way out.
So begins this strange novel. Lord Graecen recovers at the nearby house of Axelos, which is also called Cefalû. A desultory search party is sent out; it transpires that this is not the first party to have been lost in the labyrinth and never seen again. There is a rumour that a violent creature – a minotaur, even – lives in the labyrinth and has been killing villagers. The passenger ship on which they were travelling is called the Europa, to continue the bull analogy and highlight the journey from one realm into another.
But no, this is not that sort of novel at all. I suppose it is a philosophical exploration, but with powerfully realised characters and settings. Straight away it skips back in time, to explore why some of the members of that party had a compelling reason to visit Crete. Lord Graecen, a moderately successful poet with only a few months to live, is to inspect the City in the Rock which Axelos discovered. John Baird is haunted by the ghost of a German soldier he killed in one of the caves at the entrance to the labyrinth and believes that if he re-inters the remains on sanctified ground he will be freed. Campion, brilliant painter of ‘innocent, powerful paintings’ and deeply objectionable human being, is sent to Crete by the War Office to paint some war graves. He and Baird are acquaintances. Olaf Fearmax, a spiritualist who has been abandoned by his spirit guide, has no special reason to visit Crete: he is en route to Egypt. However, he is linked to Graecen and Baird through the figure of Hogarth, a psycho-analyst who has been treating him and Baird, and who is friends with Graecen. Because of this connection, they all decide to travel on the Europa.
The other passengers we meet on the ship (at which point for me at least the novel picks up; the back stories of Graecen et al. are necessary and interesting and yet also a bit dull). Awaiting the Second Coming, Miss Dombey is known to Baird from his youth; she is a peppery, rigidly religious woman with a little dog, planning to convert the heathen and horrified by the presence of a bidet in the bathroom of her cabin. Mr and Mrs Truman won their tickets in a competition; although they are slightly lower class than the other characters, their charm and good spirits win them over. Virginia Dale, on the other hand, young, beautiful and convalescent, turns out to be – horrors! – Cockney! And poorly educated! Poor Virginia is the only character whose thoughts we never share, although Durrell is too clever a writer not to make her intriguing. And despite their snobbery, both Graecen and Campion are drawn to her.
All the names are deliberately suggestive.
I am afraid I will include spoilers so be warned if you haven’t read the novel... And this is a pity, because I think it is important to read it at least once not knowing what lies ahead, not least because small crumbs of information are dropped on the way which entirely change your perception of a person, an event. This is most marked as regards Axelos and the minotaur.
(Pablo Picasso, ‘Blind Minotaur guided by Girl in the Night’, from La Suite Vollard (1934); found here)
On the voyage out, the odious Campion confesses to Fearmax that he has been profoundly affected by the medium’s writings:
[...] when the death-principle asserts itself in our lives reality gets turned inside out, so that instead of being detached from it – watching it happen as an extraneous thing – one begins to manufacture it, like a silkworm manufactures its own cocoon [...]
When one begins, as you say, reality is everything that is outside; when the principle of death germinates, first as a conscious idea, then as a fugitive subconscious premonition, finally as something beyond these: when that happens the fundamental nature of reality is changed. The individual gets fixed in his destiny and irresistibly begins to manufacture his own personal myth, his reality. Around himself there gradually accumulates a kind of mythological ectoplasm – it informs his acts and his words. The cocoon forms in which his [...] immortal self is enshrined. [...] What he does he is forced to do by the very nature of his mythopaeic role [...]
Later on, Fearmax explains that he has spent his life creating a ‘system’, a philosophy, of how the world works. He knows that it may be incorrect; he accepts that when he reaches Egypt, if he learns anything, he will forget the elements that don’t align with his system and integrate the ones that do. For him, the value is the process, the working-out of the system for himself. He is horrified by the idea of disciples, who latch on to the system he has developed without doing the necessary work of thinking for themselves.
What both men seem to agree upon is that our reality and sense of self are created by us in reaction to death. They are an act of will. Later, Ruth Adams says of her brother, ‘He [...] used to say that the whole of the Western civilization we knew was based on the Will: and that led always to action and destruction.’ In the direct aftermath of the Second World War, this must have felt very sharp to Durrell’s readers. Within the novel itself, the traumatic shadow of the conflict lies on all the characters, not just Baird.
The dark labyrinth, therefore, is in one sense the human brain (which even looks labyrinthine, doesn’t it?), creating our cocoons and shaping our reality. For this reason, Hogarth, the man who seeks to understand the human mind, is prominent in the first half of the book. In the second, he is replaced perhaps by Axelos, a man whose relation to objective truth is complex and bewildering. In this way the actual labyrinth which the tourists enter becomes an embodiment of their own minds. What happens to each of them after the rockfall is not a coincidence, it is predicated on their psyches, it is the changed face of their realities in the face of death. That is reductive; the novel is not. It remains mysterious and beautiful and surprising.
The Trumans find themselves in an enforced paradise, along with an old lady who has been trapped there for over twenty years, but who experiences a sort of radical freedom. She tells Elsie Truman:
I remembered how life was before [...] I was outside everything in a certain way. Now I participate with everything. I feel joined to everything in a new kind of way. [...] In my own mind, inside (not as something I think or feel, but as something I am) inside there I no longer prohibit and select. I include. It’s the purely scientific meaning of the word ‘love’.
Have they found the ideal existence? Nothing is so simple, perhaps. Elsie Truman realises, contentedly, one evening, that this place doesn’t ‘really exist, except in their imaginations’. And the final chapter is unexpected too.