Constance: Or, Solitary Practices

Don Precosky teaches English at the College of New Caledonia and is the
co-editor of Four Realities: Poets of Northern B.C.

Constanceis the third in a projected series of five novels. I haven’t read the first two so I cannot comment on the series and this book’s place in it. The time is 1939-1945, the Second World War. The places are Avignon, Egypt, and Geneva. Constance, the heroine, is not so much an example of that quality as one in search of it. It is something all of the important characters in the book are looking for. Durrell begins with a group of young Englishmen and women enjoying a summer of innocent uselessness in Avignon. The war pounces on them like a cat upon a mouse. They are shaken violently, then just as suddenly dropped, torn and bleeding, bewildered and disoriented. At the end, Durrell leaves his characters in a quandary — what do they do now? How do they piece their lives back together? Everything is set up for the next novel.

There are a few tiresome pseudo-Lawrentian passages about sex roles and the declining potency of sperm in the modern world, but they are all confined to a 20-page section of chapter nine. Except for these, Constanceis a piece of excellent writing. Durrell’s vocabulary is extremely rich — Europeanized yet not affected. I found myself regularly stopping to reread sentences and whole paragraphs, marvelling at the richness of the diction and the power of the metaphors.