IT is difficult to write about individuals who in their own, books have drawn heavily on their lives, experiences and personal eccentricities.

Campaigning conservationist, naturalist and wildlife writer Gerald Durrell, who died two years' ago, is one such subject. Always the most personal of writers, he was capable of delivering hilariously funny, eminently quotable throwaway lines worthy of Wodehouse and certainly true to a very specific type of Englishman abroad.

But in no place was he more abroad than in Britain, a country where he arrived as a child after his father's sudden death and soon abandoned for the delights of Corfu.

That boyhood in Corfu was so idyllic that it made the rest of his life seem a largely unhappy exile. Although he took an immense interest in food and drink and retained a lifelong boyish fascination with the natural world, nothing gave him lasting pleasure. As for his famous zoo on Jersey, he was probably its most miserable captive.

The novelist David Hughes first met him when Hughes was a 25 year old struggling writer working as an editor, and Durrell, five years his senior, was already a great man - a published writer, famous, confident and larger than life. Their friendship lasted 40 years, until Durrell's death at 70, five years after the death of his novelist brother Lawrence.

Considering the failure of Gordan Bowker's lengthy recent study, Through the Dark Labyrinth - a Biography of Lawrence Dirrell, the younger Durrell has been well served. This short portrait is far superior to most memoir/biographies. Author of The Pork Butcher, Hughes is a fine novelist and brings a novelist's understanding of character to his narrative. He also proves himself a good friend, though this is an honest, fair minded, intelligent book, not a fawning fan's eulogy.

The Durrell who emerges is both engaging and self absorbed flawed, likeable, melancholic, even tragic, and a more than adequate cook.

Interestingly, Hughes reveals that a version of this book was written more than 20 years ago, but for various reasons - not least Durrell's own comment to Hughes at the time: "Not you at your best, dear boy" - he abandoned it. It was forgotten until he was approached by Durrell's authorised biographer after the writer's death.

That show of interest revived his, and the result is a shorter, snappier work combining fact, anecdote, observation and welcome flashes of Hughes's novelistic skill.

In his first appearance in the book, Durrell seems a somnolent variation of Joyce's Buck Mulligan: "The snores drew to a close. A plump hand parted the plastic strips that kept flies out and with sluggish dignity the tall, broad figure emerged on the terrace. Durrell stood a few moments, blue pouched eyes blinking slowly in the morning light. He acknowledged nobody. The set of his head, deep in his shoulders, was both defensive and challenging. The bath towel draped over his belly hung round his knees, a cock eyed skirt vaguely suggestive of hula hula. He sniffed once, through bulbous wedge of a nose then turned back into the house. The sunrise had passed muster."

Gerald Malcolm Durrell was born in India in 1925, a late child of the Empire, and because of his father's early death became his, mother's child, as Hughes says, adding: "He remained so for the next 40 years."

He observes his subject carefully, and allows Durrell to reveal himself through his own words: "As far as I'm concerned there's only one world, and I'm in it and it's inside me." Durrell's mood swings are apparent; as Hughes notes, "With him you never quite knew whether you personally were to blame for such sudden squalls."

Hughes records Durrell's increasing preoccupation with time passing and awareness of his faltering powers as a writer.

At Durrell's funeral, Hughes' spoke to his sister Margaret and reflects how she, the last surviving sibling, shared her family's view of life as something timeless, "altogether enjoyable, slightly beyond belief... as absurd as it was important in the end a thoroughly good thing". Far more than a thoroughly good thing, Himself & Other Animals is a thoughtful, vivid and moving portrait of a real individual. {CORRECTION} 97020600068