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The Exiled Sons of Eve: Robert Liddell's Egyptian Novels
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Extract
Robert Liddell is an unjustly neglected Catholic novelist. Perhaps now that Peter Owen has reprinted three of his novels and promises to reprint them all, his bookes may at last find the audience they deserve. Lovers of Barbara Pym will remember him as Jock in A Very Private Eye; they met at Oxford and remained life-long friends. She greatly admired his novels. So did Ivy Compton-Burnett, Elizabeth Taylor, Francis King, and Walter Allen. But the list of his literary friends and admirers is endless: John Bayley, Fr. D’Arcy, Peter Levi, Iris Murdoch, Olivia Manning, Honor Tracy. All of this suggests that he must be worth reading, and he is.
His best and most characteristic works are Unreal City (1952) and The Rivers of Babylon (1959) which follow Charles Harbord from 1944 to 1953 in his teaching posts in Alexandria and Cairo. They are novels of a real and quiet distinction, in the tradition that comes down from Jane Austen. Witty, often comic, highly literate and allusive, they examine with studied understatement the great themes of exile, sin, and faith.
On the most obvious level, they provide a highly entertaining account of what it was like to teach during and after the war in such foreign places as Alexandria and Cairo. Both novels are narrated in the third person, almost entirely from Charles’s point of view, and through his eyes we get a vivid picture of both great cities without, however, any scene painting.
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- Copyright © 1994 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Robert Liddell wrote over twenty books. The place of publication is always London unless otherwise noted. The Almond Tree (Jonathan Cape, 1938)Google Scholar. Kind Relations (Jonathan Cape, 1939)Google Scholar, The Gantillons (Jonathan Cape. 1940)Google Scholar, Watering‐Place (Jonathan Cape, 1945)Google Scholar (short stories), The Last Enchantments (Jonathan Cape, 1948)Google Scholar republished, Owen, Peter, 1991, Unreal City (Jonathan Cape, 1952)Google Scholar republished Peter Owen, 1993, The Rivers of Babylon (Jonathan Cape, 1959)Google Scholar. An Object for a Walk (Longmans, 1966)Google Scholar. The Deep End (Longmans, 1968)Google Scholar. Stepsons (Longmans, 1969)Google Scholar republished Peter Owen, 1992, The Aunts (Peter Owen, 1987)Google Scholar; Fabre, Ferdinand, The Abbé Tigrane, translated by Liddell, Robert (Peter Owen, 1988)Google Scholar. The Novels of Ivy Campton‐Burnett (Gollancz, 1955)Google Scholar. The Novels of Jane Austen (Longmans, 1963)Google Scholar, The Novels of George Eliot (Duckworth, 1977)Google Scholar. A Mind at Ease: Barbara Pym and her Novels (Peter Owen, 1989)Google Scholar, Twin Spirits: The Novels of Emily and Anne Bronte (Peter Owen. 1990)Google Scholar; A Treatise on the Novel (Jonathan Cape, 1947)Google Scholar. Some Principles of Fiction (Jonathan Cape, 1953)Google Scholar; Aegean Greece (Jonathan Cape, 1954)Google Scholar, Byzantium and Istanbul (Jonathan Cape, 1956)Google Scholar, The Morea (Jonathan Cape, 1968)Google Scholar, Mainland Greece (Longmans, 1965)Google Scholar; Cavafy: A Critical Biography (Duckworth, 1974)Google Scholar, Elizabeth and Ivy (Peter Owen, 1986)Google Scholar; Williams, Gwyn, Flying in Egypt: The Story of a Verse War, 1943‐45 (Port Talbot, West Glamorgan, Alun Books, 1991)Google Scholar (contributions in light verse.)
2 Unreal City (Jonathan Cape, 1952), p. 19Google Scholar. All further references to this work will be given parenthetically by page numbers in the text.
3 In 1966 Robert Liddell added An Object for a Walk to connect the three English and two Egyptian novels, but he later decided it was a mistake, so he wrote me, and it must be admitted that the novel is inferior to Unreal City and The Rivers of Babylon. Diffuse and straying at times beyond his range, it is of interest largely, despite its fine and very funny last section for what it tells us about Charles, first at Oxford and then while he works one summer in a refugee camp near Gaza.
4 An Object for a Walk (Longmans, 1966), p. 7Google Scholar.
5 The Rivers of Babylon (Jonathan Cape, 1959), p. 218Google Scholar. All further references to this work will be given parenthetically by page numbers in the text.