'At night,' Roland Barthes once wrote, 'the adjectives come back.' It's an eerie and sobering thought for writers who have been trying to clean up their act during the day, but for Lawrence Durrell as for Conrad adjectives don't come back because they never left. If there is a mystery in Conrad it's inscrutable, if there's a tangle in Durrell it's inextricable. And to stay with the latter: if there's a treasury it's inexhaustible, creatures of habit are inveterate, dusk is blue, shadows and trams are violet, dawn is mauve - but then so are voices and a mosque.

LRB 1 January 2009 | PDF Download