In his note accompanying the publication of Tunc, Durrell announced: "By intention this is the first deck of a double-decker novel"; in his afterword to Nunquam, he identified the two volumes as "a two-part novel of an oldfashioned sort." Since Durrell regarded Tunc-Nunquam as one work, under the title The Revolt of Aphrodite, and since critical tradition has followed suit in discussing these two volumes as one work, they will here be discussed simultaneously. The primary social concern of The Revolt of Aphrodite is the dire condition of contemporary culture and as Durrell put it in an interview, the "revolting civilization we've hatched up here."

At the center of The Revolt of Aphrodite is "the firm," a vast shadowy multinational corporation, which employs most of the characters, which demands absolute loyalty from its members, which, above all, stands for raw exploitation. The thrust of the social...