IN Homer’s Odyssey, nepenthe is the drug administered by Helen to treat the sorrows of Menelaus’s guests after the Trojan War. It is also the name Norman Douglas chose for his fictional island off the south coast of Italy where he set his hedonistic 1917 novel South Wind.

The guests on Nepenthe, however, are not seeking respite from war, but a heady escape from the strictures of mainstream society.

Thomas Heard, the Anglican Bishop of Bampopo in Central Africa, is travelling back to England and stops off for 12 days on the island. Feeling seasick upon his arrival, by the end of his stay, he has been spiritually – and physically – purged. 

Mr Heard – as he wishes to be called – steps ashore just as a religious festival is getting under way in honour of the island’s patron saint, Dodekanus. The celebration reaches its climax with a performance of 12 episodes from the saint’s life, the finale of which involves a “cannibalistic feast … ending with a tempestuous, demoniacal war dance”.

Mr Heard cannot “make up his mind whether to be shocked or pleased. He wondered whether such a play had any features in common with religion. His host, who stood for paganism and nudity and laughter, convinced him that it had”.

Nepenthe is a place living in a Bacchanalian past, one that northern puritans look upon with horror; Mr Heard is at first worried and – “oh dear” – mildly disapproving.

But the sirocco clears away that English restraint and the novel becomes a wild tour of the island’s character, people and history. It is a skewed and beautiful hymn to the irrational and base nature of the human mind.

There is Frederick Parker, who owns the Alpha and Omega club, a “boozing institution, where you run to seed”; Mr Keith, a ranting Scottish idealist whose long speeches on progress and civilisation bore and beguile; and Mr Eames, a modern Casaubon editing a never-ending encyclopaedia of the island.

Then there is the local Russian sect led by an overweight monk called Bazhakuloff whose followers are called The Little White Cows. The celebration of human folly in South Wind often gives way to light-hearted satire.

There are some truly great scenes in this novel, shot through with Douglas’s sly ironic tone. When a “health-giving” spring dries up the locals fear for their livelihood: “The natives called to mind, with consternation, that only once within the memory of their ancestors had the mountain behaved after this fashion.

“It was on the eve of that great volcanic outbreak on the mainland which, by a deadly shower of ashes, destroyed their crops and impoverished them to such an extent that for three consecutive months they could barely afford the most unnecessary luxuries of life.”

This passage is a forewarning of what is to come. Later, the island’s own volcano erupts, covering the houses and streets in thick blanket of dust.

This volcanic mess eventually clears away, but not before Mr Parker, acting out of selfish motives, and to curry favour with the church, encourages the local priest to hold a procession through the clogged streets.

It is a lucid and brilliant moment in a wild and divergent novel, where, for example, whole chapters are given over to funny but long-winded conversations between characters. South Wind doesn’t really cohere, but we forgive Douglas, above left. Life, we sense, is not coherent either. Douglas can write so well of outsiders because he was one.

Nepenthe is based loosely on Capri, his refuge from modern civilisation. A great travel writer, he was friends with some of the greats of the day, including EM Forster and DH Lawrence.

However, his life was marred by perversions, notably his sexual obsession with young boys.

In Michael Schmidt’s introduction to this new edition, he claims it is hard “to come to terms” with this. But only if you think a person’s moral turpitude denigrates his or her art. Many a writer – William Burroughs, above, comes to mind – has led a life of iniquity. It takes nothing away from their books.

As for Mr Heard, his church morals are frayed and tattered by the end of South Wind. So much so that on his last day he can observe a flagrant violation of one of the more sensible of the 10 commandments, “thou shalt not kill”, and rationalise that the murderer was not entirely in the wrong.

Instead, he throws back another tumbler of booze, the modern day equivalent of nepenthe, and relaxes into a new kind of dizzy amoral freedom.

South Wind by Norman Douglas is published by Apollo, priced £12