Books: Island Interlude

THE DARK GLASSES (183 pp.)—Francis King—Pantheon ($2.95).

Take an Anglo-Saxon with an ailing love life and plant him under the Mediterranean sun. Will the change kill or cure him? This theme has more or less dominated a spate of recent novels, notably The Exchange of Joy (set in Italy), The Capri Letters (Italy), A Slimmer Night (Italy) and The Sea and the Stone (Greece). In The Dark Glasses the atmospheric catalyst is the Greek resort island of Corfu, and the inhibited patient is a 39-year-old crew-cut Englishman named Patrick Orde whose eleven-year marriage to a Greek woman is not so much on...