The Exiled Sons of Eve: Robert Liddell's Egyptian Novels

Abstract

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.