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At length, Charlock tumbles on an inexpensive way of turning a few cents worth of salt into a revolutionary washday product, and wants to donate the discovery to the betterment of mankind, but The Firm opposes him. His last attempt to exercise free will has been thwarted, and now he learns that his idea of freedom was illusory: he needed The Firm as much as it needed him. Charlock's most important discovery is that the slave is born with his chains. He retires to perfect Abel as an engine of revenge. There is a Hitchcock ending that is best left undisclosed.
Now or Never. Deep-dyed fatalism and the durable myth of Frankenstein surface from Durrell's dazzling assemblage. There are reams of the kind of beautiful travel and nature writing for which his Bitter Lemons, Prospero's Cell and Reflections on a Marine Venus have been praised. There are flashes of the ribald wit that makes his volumes about the British diplomatic corps such delights. But there is also much over writing. The book is littered with show-off phrases such as "alembicated piety" and "the penetralia of one's self-regard." The mixed metaphors are painful: "I lay on the slab, the mortuary slab of my immortal life—twitching like a skate in a frying pan." And the puns are leaden: a Rolls-Royce is a "flatus symbol," lovemaking is a "deathscapade," and a gourmet ponders whether there is "life beyond the gravy."
Yet all the annoying nits are brushed aside by Durrell's gaiety, originality, raw talent and rebellious exuberance. And there is more to come. Britain's Durrell, 56, who is currently visiting the U.S. for the first time, is already at work on a sequel, to be titled Numquam. "The whole is based on a passage from Petronius," he explains, "which talks about now or never, nunc ant numquam. In the old days, the passage says, the women would mess themselves up and go on top of the mountain and pray for rain, and believe in it, and say, 'Now or Never,' and the rain would come. In the modern age, we don't believe we can move Heaven any more." Durrell's hero learns how.
In California, Durrell was staying at the Pacific Palisades home of Novelist Henry Miller, an old friend and compulsive pen pal. Pursuing his investigations of Western culture, he played ping-pong with Miller and visited Disneyland, where he made three trips on the Mark Twain paddlewheeler and took the "Submarine Voyage." It may be that these adventures will find their way into Durrell's next novel: as a man and a writer, he has learned how to enjoy civilization and its discontents. Perhaps this is what Durrell suggested when he had his Felix Charlock declare: "We should tackle reality in a slightly joky way, otherwise we miss its point."