posted on 20 Nov 2022

White Eagles Over Serbia by Lawrence Durrell

Prompted by reviews elsewhere on Letterpress of Lawrence Durrell’s Dark Labyrinth (here) and Justine (here) I recently bought a charity shop paperback of his Cold War adventure story, White Eagles Over Serbia (1957).

It is hard to imagine anything further removed from the usual mix of mysticism, myth, sensuality, eroticism and profoundly purple prose that Durrell is most widely known for. This is very much a Boy’s Own-style masculine adventure story and unless I am very mistaken is not without a touch of gentle but knowing pastiche.

Its hero, Colonel Methuen, is an agent of the British intelligence service and we meet him in central London’s club-land one June evening some time in the mid-1950s. He is recently returned from a gruelling mission somewhere in the Malayan jungle and is eager for a holiday — he has in mind a country inn he is fond of where the local trout streams provide good fly fishing. But his boss, the shabby old Etonian Dombey, has other ideas and is keen to persuade Methuen to go almost immediately to investigate the murder of a fellow agent in the mountains of Serbia — possibly at the hands of an underground Royalist cell which it is thought is plotting to overthrow the newly installed communist regime of Tito and return the king to the throne. Methuen is the natural candidate for the task as he knows this remote, mountainous region of the Balkans well, he speaks the language, and if all else fails his passion for fly fishing may clinch matters — the area is renowned for its beautiful, fast-flowing trout rivers.

What follows is a classic tale of gentlemanly derring-do against tremendous odds in Cold War communist Yugoslavia.

The astonishing thing is that the dreadful old roué Durrell could write this kind of thing convincingly. Anyone who has ever enjoyed John Buchan, early le Carré and especially the classic Geoffrey Household thrillers Rogue Male (1939) and Rough Shoot (1953) will find themselves right at home.

I won’t spoil the adventures by telling you too much. Suffice it to say that Methuen accepts the mission and although wounded does return to considerable glory — albeit all very self-deprecating and reluctantly acknowledged, as befits a gentleman.

Rather like Household’s books, I found myself reading White Eagles less for the adventure and more for the hugely evocative descriptive writing and background atmosphere. Here’s a small flavour:

"Though Methuen usually lived at his club whenever he was in London it was seldom that he was seen in the bar or the gaunt smoking rooms. This afternoon in June was something of an exception — and he surprised himself when he found that he was crossing the marble staircase by the porter’s lodge, to push open the swing doors which opened on the private lounge."

Or later, accosted by his boss Dombey, he is dragged back to the ‘shop’ — the offices of Special Operations Q branch — so that Dombey has his maps to hand and can explain this new mission in proper detail:

"The two men walked slowly out into the grey London dusk, arm in arm, like bondsmen…darkness was falling as they reached the anonymous square where, in the shadow of the Seven Dials, Special Operations Unit lived and had its being. A duty clerk sat sorting letters on a green baize table-top…Methuen, gazing up for a moment at the smoke-blue night sky caught a glimpse of the battered angels which ornamented the roof of the building, riding there in the darkness like twelve ancient figure-heads."

The scene-setting is marvellous and 1950s London is very alive on the page. The rural and mountain settings later in the book are extremely reminiscent of Geoffrey Household’s landscape writing, I think.

Not all of the action sequences are perhaps quite as exciting as would be necessary in a contemporary thriller, but anyone reading this will be doing so for its special period charm and atmosphere, I suspect, and won’t mind its relative ‘quietness’. 

This may not be amongst Durrell’s most important work but it is better and more sophisticated than I expected and I really enjoyed it. It is a period thriller that still has all its period charm intact. If you know someone who likes old school thrillers in which gentleman are gentlemen first and spies second and there’s no sex or bad language, then you’ve just found the perfect Christmas gift. The paperback edition was reissued just last year.

 

Alun Severn

November 2022