My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell

Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals

 

We chose this as a bit of light relief after Anna Karenina. It is extremely funny – everyone laughed out loud at one stage or another, very embarrassing for those bookclubbers who were reading it on the Tube! Several of us had read it before, at least two as a “school book”. The second time round it was obviously different, because of having an adult perspective and capacity; we found we appreciated the descriptions, which we had been barely conscious of before, probably having rushed over them to get to the “action”.

The descriptions, whether of people, animals or scenery, are incredibly lush and in fact OTT. Durrell makes use of the most startling comparisons all the time – “a hermit crab of massive proportions, wearing an anemone on his shell, like a bonnet with a pink flower on it.” He has his own special anthropomorphism for animals and can read the expressions on the most unlikely reptile and insect faces: he describes the expressions on a tortoise’s face as variously “pleading”, “of bemused good humour”, “thoughtful”; a mantis’s as “scornful” and even a gecko’s as “what he fondly imagined to be a look of blood-curdling ferocity” and “an expression of smug happiness”. People-plus-dogs are especially notable – e.g. Mrs Durrell and Dodo.

The descriptions are too rich to rush through: they need to be enjoyed at a leisurely pace. There is no plot, so it is a good book to take up and put down, and enjoy without any urgency to find out what happens in the end.

The characters are as remarkable as the animals. Spiro the Greek taxi-driver who adopted the family, reminding some of the famous Meerkats in the (2013) comparethemarket adverts; Gerald’s succession of tutors; Lugaretzia the home help; and of course the various members of the Durrell family themselves. They are like caricatures of the English eccentric – people expected the English to be eccentric, and the Durrells had no hesitation in living up to expectations. They were too eccentric to be true, overdrawn, with a chaotic lifestyle – there are simply no boxes to fit their types into.

Kralefsky’s mother who explained how her flowers talked to each other was simply another delightfully eccentric character – but a week before the book club meeting in which we discussed the book, an amazingly timely article appeared in the Metro in which scientists maintain that plants do in fact communicate with each other. An abbreviated version is available at

http://metro.co.uk/2013/05/07/plants-dont-need-heir-just-a-good-chat-together-3714395/

The reader does wonder what the family lived on; as the author was between 8 and 12 at the period he narrates, he had a child’s uninterest. One would be tempted to think that they were simply and comfortably rich enough to be able to live as they chose, but there are a few references to overdrafts and bank managers that suggest this was not the case, even allowing for the fact that in the early 1930s on a Greek island, food and other necessities, even the “villas” that they lived in, must have been comparatively cheap.

 It was interesting to contrast Durrell’s picture of a family and life with Roma Tearne’s in Brixton Beach. They might be living on two different planets.

The question was also raised of what children today, brought up on Harry Potter, could make of this book. Some felt that children have sufficiently elastic imaginations to be able to appreciate it, however far it is from their own experience. Others, however, thought that as children today don’t go out at all and are totally computer-oriented and have no desire to explore and discover the real world, they would be unable to grasp or appreciate it. For children in the 1950s when the book was written, through to the 1980s,  the picture of life on Corfu was a dream come true. One bookclubber offered to send it to her 11-year-old American niece to find out her reaction.

Finally, we discovered from Wikipedia that the story as told in the book is not strictly accurate - Larrie, Gerald's eldest brother, was actually married and living in another villa with his wife at this time, while the book represents him as part of the family circle; and other points.