His flights of imagination employ mythic and literary motifs of birth, death, drowning, crucifixion, with copulation and frank sexual descriptions chief among these.

In addition to encounters with the same cast of hotel residents found in Lawrence’s narrative, Gregory’s plot arc mainly concerns his relationship with the tubercular Grace, a waiflike working-class woman he rescued one winter night.

As his kept woman, her bourgeois tendencies (a love of dancing and Gary Cooper) both fascinate and disgust him, as he remains committed to his own writer’s bohemian life.

Alone, Gregory sees his salvation in pursuing a perfectly conventional middle-class life with Kate, a widowed waitress he meets in the town where Grace died.

Lawrence, likewise finding it necessary to leave the cold and lifeless existence of England, rejects Gregory’s “quaint suicide.” Instead, he bids farewell to his hotel acquaintances and journeys to Greece with his unnamed female lover.

In reviewing it in The Observer, Philip Toynbee wrote, This is a wild, passionate, brilliantly gaudy and flamboyant extravaganza; it is intrinsically and essentially, the book of a young man – Durrell was 24 when he wrote it – richly obscene, energetically morbid, very often very funny indeed, self-pitying, but, above all, stylistically and verbally inventive as no other young man's novel of the period was even attempting to be.Durrell told an interviewer that when he arrived in London in 1937, at Victoria Station, after a long period abroad, the first thing Hugh Gordon Porteus said to him was that Wyndham Lewis would 'have it in for him', because of the 'portrait' of Lewis in The Black Book.