On Levantine Shores

MY FAMILY AND OTHER ANIMALS (273 pp.)--Gerald Durrell--Viking ($3.95).

THE TOWERS OF TREBIZOND (277 pp.)--Rose Macaulay--Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($3.75).

When an irresistible force called a tourist meets an immovable object called a country, the result is sometimes a travel book. The tourists who consistently write the best travel books are those literate and indefatigable nomads, the British. Two lively new British travelogues, one thinly disguised as a novel, cover such comparatively avant-garde areas of modern tourism as Turkey and the isles of Greece.

Hellion in Paradise. Zoologist Gerald Durrell was ten years old in 1934 when his family settled on the Ionian resort island of Corfu for what proved to be a five-year stay. Fending off a swarm of taxi drivers, the Durrells met their own personal "Zorba the Greek" when a swarthy islander named Spiro shouted to the beleaguered family, "Hoy! Whys donts you have someones who can talks your own language?" Neither Spiro nor the local hotel guide could quite grasp certain Anglo-Saxon eccentricities ("But Madame, what for you want a bathroom? Have you not got the sea?"). The Durrells were soon ensconced in a strawberry-pink hillside villa (the first of three), and after they began breakfasting under tangerine trees, bathing from crescent-shaped beaches that looked "like fallen moons" and exchanging the beautiful Greek greeting chairete (be happy) with their neighbors, the Durrells realized that they had fallen under the spell of the wine-dark sea.

Young Gerry, already a budding zoologist, was a bit of a hellion in this demi-paradise, but only because of his avid scientific urge to bring all the island fauna home. There was the day brother Leslie I went upstairs to bathe and found two snakes in the tub, and the day brother Larry started to light a cigarette from a matchboxful of scorpions. Gerry had been studying the scorpions' mating dance. The rest of the family had their own little idiosyncrasies to which, as his title suggests. Author Durrell pays his amused and amusing respects.

But he is at his best in describing the island's magic which "each day had a tranquillity, a timelessness, about it, so that you wished it would never end." It is Author Durrell's special gift to evoke that sense of timelessness through vivid still lifes of nature and the natives: "Across the mouth of the bay a sun-bleached boat would pass, rowed by a brown fisherman in tattered trousers, standing in the stern and twisting an oar in the water like a fish's tail. He would raise one hand in lazy salute, and across the still, blue water you could hear the plaintive squeak of the oar as it twisted, and the soft clop as it dug into the sea."

Last of the Byzantines. In her own book Author Rose Macaulay, sixtyish daughter of a Cambridge don, moves east of Corfu, assembling a fictional travel party of three bound for Turkey and vicinity. Aunt Dot is an old-style militant feminist bent on writing a book about "Women of the Euxine Today." Father Chantry-Pigg is a High Anglican churchman who wants to study the prospects for proselytizing in Moslem Turkey. Aunt Dot's niece Laurie, the narrator, has no special interest in the Turks; she is drawn to a vision of past Greek glory when the Black Sea port of Trebizond was the capital of an empire, falling in 1461 to Mohammed II as the last bastion of fragmented Byzantine power.

Laurie's first view of Trebizond and the palace remains of the dynasty of the Grand Comnenus has the tinge of melancholy common to all travel among ruins where the past holds up a mirror to the future and reflects the ironic metamorphoses of history: "There was some confusion as to which ruins were which, but you could see the eight pointed windows of the palace banqueting hall, and through them there was a view of the whole landscape, with the broken citadel walls twisting about among the small gardens and cottages." Like most other empires, this one no doubt deserved to go under, reflects Laurie, but not so far under as Trebizond has gone, becoming a shabby little town called Trabzon, with a black squalid beach, and "full of those who do not know the past."

If Laurie has lost her romantic dream, she also comes to know some of the changeless riches of the Levant--fruit, flowers, enchanted landscapes. As for Father Chantry-Pigg, he makes no Anglican converts among Mohammed's followers, and Aunt Dot is content to pray for her veiled backward sisters who have ignored the progressive edicts of Ataturk. But like the literate British travelers they are, she and Laurie go home to write a book, possibly one as charming as The Towers of Trebizond.

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