Maze with a Moral

THE DARK LABYRINTH (266 pp.)--Lawrence Durrell--Dutton ($3.95).

A wildly disparate group of people, traveling the Mediterranean on a cruise ship called Europa, disembark in Crete to explore a labyrinth advertised as the mythic one of the fabled Minotaur. There is a lady missionary, a male medium, an archaeologist, an artist, a young girl clerk, and a jolly middle-aged couple who won the trip as a prize in a newspaper competition. A landslide cuts them off from the outside world. Several of them die, a few manage to return to everyday life, and two of them are transported to a peculiar, bucolic, almost supernatural existence in a valley of plenty from which, however, there is no returning to the outer world. The fate of each--death, life, or superlife --is shown to be subtly appropriate.

Author Durrell's thesis is that everyone inevitably weaves his own destiny: "We live by a very exacting kind of poetic logic--since we get exactly what we ask for, no more, and no less." But only in the threatening dark of the labyrinth does man achieve the enlightenment with which to perceive his own fate.

The Dark Labyrinth is a new old book, written when Durrell was 33, midway between his youthful Black Book, a greyish imitation of Henry Miller, and the artful arabesques of The Alexandria Quartet.

When first published in 1947, as Cefalu, it attracted little attention. It suffers somewhat from the fact that Durrell had not yet asserted his independence from such models as Aldous Huxley, and from an excessive urge to moralize. But Durrell is already demonstrating his ability to make the reader care intensely for his characters, even for those--and this is true mastery--that are thoroughly unlikable. Already he can evoke a subtle kind of suspense in which the reader wonders not merely "What will become of so-and-so?" but also "What will he become?" For the action, ultimately, proceeds inward, into the characters.

Durrell is sloppy about his grammar and careless about facts. Thus a spiritualist of the 30s is shown receiving otherworldly messages "from Edward Gibbon and Ramon Novarro to such of their descendants as might still be living." Novarro, a spry 62-year-old living in North Hollywood, is to this day perfectly able to communicate with anyone by word of mouth rather than mediums. But at the center of Durrell's Labyrinth, there lurks enough true humanity to make up for a little bit of bull.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.