‘This is not a political book’: Bitter Lemons as British propaganda

Extract

‘This is not a political book, but simply a somewhat impressionistic study of moods and atmospheres of Cyprus during the troubled years 1953-6.’ (11)

The first sentence of Bitter Lemons, Lawrence Durrell’s book about Cyprus, has always intrigued me for the multi-layered contradictions that it contains. There is the internal contradiction within the sentence itself — how can a work which claims to be a ‘study of the moods and atmospheres of Cyprus during the troubled years of 1953-6’ not be a ‘political book’? Don’t we immediately think of political troubles when we read ‘the troubled years 1953-6,’ after all, what else makes those years troubled? There is the contradiction between the first sentence and the rest of the book, for a major part of Bitter Lemons, indeed the final third, directly addresses the political situation on Cyprus.