21 | June | 2026 | Thornfield Hall

Some of us like dolls, some of us do not. My mother loved dolls. We had Suzy Smart (she came with her own desk and blackboard), and Tammy and Pepper, my favorites, who seemed to be just about my own age, so I could imagine stories about them, and act them out with the dolls. Tammy had her own soda fountain in her cardboard Tammy house! Pepper had a plastic treehouse!

Of course we had Barbie, but Barbie never had adventures, because we didn’t have the faintest idea who this adult doll was. She didn’t have a soda fountain in her cardboard Dream House; she had a vanity table (that says it all). We preferred Barbie’s freckled best friend, Midge, Barbie’s sister, Skipper, and Skipper’s best friend, Scooter. Again, it was not much fun to play with any of them. It defied our imagination.

Barbie’s Little Theater drove a friend of mine mad. My crazy-funny best friend laughingly lynched Skipper from the proscenium arch, which was shocking at the time and, in retrospect, disturbing. But it never happened again. That was the end of Barbies for all of us.

Lawrence Durrell seems to have been as disturbed by dolls as my friend was. When I was writing about Lawrence Durrell’s Monsieur, the first novel in The Avignon Quintet, I forgot to mention the doll scene. It is violent and disturbing.

One of the main characters in Monsieur, Rob Sutcliffe, a sardonic novelist, is obsessed with a box his wife Pia takes with her everywhere, even when they travel. Rob has promised Pia not to look in the box, but one day he sneaks back early, hoping to open the lid and find the secret. In the hotel room he finds Pia happily having a tea party with dozens of dolls in international costumes.

For some reason, the dolls drive him insane. He screams, he pulls off their limbs, he throws them in the fire. Poor Pia! Why didn’t she protect her dolls? And so how can we be surprised that this sad soul runs away with a “negress” named Trash. Pia had issues, and so did violent Rob.

P.S. When I was middle-aged, a well-traveled relative gave me an “international” doll who wore a Japanese kimono and carried an umbrella. Not knowing what else to do with it, I stuck the doll on a shelf in the closet. Every time I reach up to that high shelf, the doll falls on my head.

No one reads Lawrence Durrell anymore.

And yet his sultry postmodern masterpiece, The Alexandria Quartet, is still read by angel-headed hipsters. Set in Alexandria, Egypt, these four novels, written in a lush, lyrical style, describe life in the late 1930s and early 1940s in Alexandria through the eyes of an English writer, Darley.

Durrell’s The Avignon Quintet, a later, darker series of novels, is completely unlike The Alexandria Quartet. The first volume, Monsieur, or The Prince of Darkness, won the James Tait Black award in 1974, but even the Durrell fan may wonder why. The novel seems dated, the style is awkward, and though there are many comic scenes, it is wildly incoherent and pretentious, veering from dreamy descriptions of Avignon to repulsive meditations on death, suicide, and gnosticism, a religious philosophy of the 2nd century A.D. that those of us who read about it in The Alexandria Quartet hoped never to hear about again.

The novel Monsieur begins with a violent death. The narrator (or apparent narrator: we’re in postmodern territory) is Bruce, a doctor who returns to Avignon when he learns of his best friend Piers’ death. Bruce is a nice chap: he organizes the funeral. He and Piers were not only close, they were in an incestuous ménage à trois with Bruce’s mad wife, Piers’ sister.

Bruce believed that Piers committed suicide, until during the funeral he learns that the corpse is headless. Bruce and Toby, a shaggy history professor, believe that the cause of death was rooted in gnosticism, a religious philosophy of the 2nd century A.D. PIers joined a gnostic cult after attending a lecture in Alexandria, then eating mummia (bits of mummies) and hallucinating about snakes.

Anyway, headless corpses, snakes, incest. And then there’s Rob Sutcliffe, a character who wrote a satiric novel about the ménage à trois, who is also haunted by sex and death. He was obsessed with his wife, Pia, Bruce’s sister, who left him to have a lesbian relationship with a Negress named,,, Trash. Eventually, he commits suicide.

That said, this novel is not only incoherent but is actually disgusting.

I do love Durrell and recommend his other books, espeically The Complete Antrobus, a Wodehouse-ian collection of satiric stories about a diplomat.