The first sentence of Bitter Lemons, Lawrence Durrell's book about Cyprus, has always intrigued me for the multi-layered contradictions that it contains. There is the internal contradiction within the sentence itself–how can a work which claims to be a ‘study of the moods and atmospheres of Cyprus during the troubled years of 1953–6’ not be a ‘political book’? Don't we immediately think of political troubles when we read ‘the troubled years 1953–6,’ after all, what else makes those years troubled? There is the contradiction between the first sentence and the rest of the book, for a major part of Bitter Lemons, indeed the final third, directly addresses the political situation on Cyprus. And there is also the contradiction between the author's nonpolitical book and his very political job as head of the Public Information Office on Cyprus from 1954 to 1956. Can we believe that that man who was one of the Colonial ‘spin doctors’, to use contemporary terminology, could write a book about ‘the troubled years 1953–6’ without attempting a political spin? Obviously, the first sentence of Bitter Lemons is a perfect example of a sentence that protests too much, and the simple fact that the author wants to tell us that the book is not political is clear proof that it is. It says something about the state of Durrell scholarship that, forty years after the publication of the book, one still feels the need to point this out. © 2000, Maney Publishing.
