Livia (novel)

Livia: Or Buried Alive (1978), is the second volume in British author Lawrence Durrell's The Avignon Quintet, published from 1974 to 1985. Durrell has described the novels as "roped together like climbers on a rockface, but all independent [...] a series of books through which the same characters move for all the world as if to illustrate the notion of reincarnation." The description of this form for the quintet actually appears in Livia. The first novel of the quincunx (the 'figurative shape' of five used on a die or playing card), Monsieur, received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1974.

Plot summary

The key protagonist in Livia is novelist Aubrey Blanford, introduced as a character 50 pages before the end of the first novel of the quintet, Monsieur. Blanford travels to Avignon to stay with his fellow Oxford students Sam and Hilary, whose sister has inherited the broken-down chateau of Tu Duc. They embark on an idyllic boat trip to the chateau and then on the restoration of the property.

With Monsieur now revealed as the fictional work of Rob Sutcliffe, a writer invented by Blanford as his alter ego, it is in Livia we meet the 'real-life' characters behind Sutcliffe/Blanford's fictional creations. Like Monsieur, Livia opens with a death—that of Constance, who lived on in Blanford's mind (as 'Tu') at the end of Monsieur. Livia in fact predates Monsieur—effectively a 'prequel'—and is set in Provence before World War II, with the outbreak of war taking place as the novel closes on the great debauch, or 'spree' hosted by the Egyptian Prince Hassad. The events in Livia take place in the increasing atmosphere of impending war, with the group of young friends at Tu Duc enjoying a last summer before the encroachment of Nazism.