70. The Alexandria Quartet: Mountolive by Lawrence Durrell

Year Published: 1958
Pages: 261
First Sentence: As a junior of exceptional promise, he had been sent to Egypt for a year in order to improve his Arabic and found himself attached to the High Commission as a sort of scribe to await his first diplomatic posting; but he was already conducting himself as a young secretary of legation, fully aware of the responsibilities of future office.
Rating: 2/3 (meh)

Review:
I've made a huge mistake.

I shouldn't've picked up The Alexandria Quartet after a year. I especially shouldn't've picked it up without a glance at my old reviews, or trying to find a spoiler-free plot synopsis of the previous two books (a legitimate concern, considering the books' interconnectedness). In fact the only thing that Mountolive proved is that it is indeed correct to consider The Alexandria Quartet all together as one work. Because I had no idea what was happening throughout Mountolive.

Oh, to be honest, a couple/few things were actually clear. Spoilers to follow of course. When he was a young man, Mountolive boned Nessim's mom. Later, Nessim becomes a conspirator with the Palestinians, and Justine and Balthazar are collaborators, meaning that the Interlinear can't entirely be believed, because by the way Justine was sleeping with LGD (here called Darley and no longer our narrator) to use him and spy on Pursewarden. Pursewarden, meanwhile, may have been in love with his sister (?!), and learned about the Palestine stuff via Melissa. What I mean is that this is all just another layer, except that I couldn't remember enough of the previous two books, so there was nothing to support this latest new information. Oops.

I didn't find much of what I liked about Justine in Mountolive, either. I'm not sure if the style is supposed to be reflective of the character of Mountolive, who is very buttoned up and is also basically the main character in this book, but it just didn't work for me.

Still I'm extremely curious about what happens in Clea. I'm sure that it's just one final layer on top of all of this. Clea has been popping up everywhere and knows everyone but remains a mystery herself, which I'd really like to get to the bottom of. At the same time, I struggled with Mountolive a lot. Maybe I'll pick up the Quartet again in another year. And prepare a bit better next time.

- - - - -

To love was absurd, like being knocked off the mantelpiece.

- - - - -

'The only hope, sir' said the young attaché quietly, and not without a certain relish, so pleasing to a part of the mind is the prospect of total destruction, as the only cure for the classical ennui of modern man.

- - - - -

Dancing again he said to her, but with drunken irony: 'Melissa, comment vous défendez-vous contre la foule?' Her response, for some queer reason, cut him to the heart. She turned upon him an eye replete with all the candour of experience and replied softly: 'Monsieur, je ne me défends plus.'

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70. The Alexandria Quartet: Balthazar by Lawrence Durrell

Year Published: 1958
Pages: 182
First Sentence: Landscape-tones: brown to bronze, steep skyline, low cloud, pearl ground with shadowed oyster and violet reflections.
Rating: 2/3 (meh)


Review:
I usually try to write my reviews within a few days of finishing the books, when I've had a chance to ponder a bit but not to forget everything (I have abysmal recall abilities). For a few reasons I had to put off this review, though, and now here I am some time later trying to write about Balthazar and decide at the same time whether I want to continue reading The Alexandria Quartet at all.

Because, you see, while I liked Justine quite a lot, I liked Balthazar quite a lot less than that.

The premise is thus: our anonymous narrator from Justine (initials revealed to be LGD, which, yes, are the same as Lawrence Durrell's) sends his finished manuscript to his friend Balthazar, a minor character from the first novel. Balthazar is a gay mystic who doesn't seem to figure much in this book bearing his name, either. He returns the manuscript to LGD with significant and substantial markups.

LGD calls this "the Interlinear," and it reveals that Justine didn't love him at all. She only used LGD to distract her husband Nessim's attention from her affair with Pursewarden, a minor writer character introduced in the first book, who didn't love her back. This revelation may have shocked me as much as it did LGD.

Pursewarden is expanded and improved here considerably from his Justine appearance. Nessim's brother is brought into the action, as well as the still mysterious Mountolive, who seems to have something to do with diplomacy. Nessim's brother is in love with Clea, who barely knows he exists, and this leads to a murder.

There is a lot going on in this book, woven as it is between two different people's perspectives and speculations. Whereas I enjoyed the arbitrary cast of characters and random threads in the first book, their compounding here has become much more confusing. Do I care enough about these people to keep reading and find out what happens in the end?

Maybe.

Clea is the most compelling character, and she remains somewhat of a cypher here. The title suggests that she must figure prominently in the fourth book. She is "golden," a painter, wounded and peaceful, or at least so far. I'm interested in her, but I'm not sure if I'm interested enough to keep reading, at least not right now.

So: Balthazar is an ok book and a fine companion to Justine.

For now I'm going to pause my reading of the Quartet, but I may revisit it in the future if my curiosity gets the better of me.

- - - - -

'What have you done to your face?' I say to change the subject. He has recently started to grow a moustache. He holds on to it defensively as if my question constituted a threat to shave it off forcibly. 'My moustache, ah that! Well, recently I have had so many reproofs about work, not attending to it, that I analysed myself deeply, au fond. Do you know how many man-hours I am losing through women? You will never guess. I thought a moustache (isn't it hideous?) would put them off a bit, but no. It is just the same. ...'

- - - - -

But then I suppose we live in the shallows of one another's personalities and cannot really see into the depths beneath.

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70. The Alexandria Quartet: Justine by Lawrence Durrell

(I'm dropping the "Uncomfortable Plot Summaries" because I'm terrible at them. -M.R.)

Year Published: 1957
Pages: 203
First Sentence: The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind.
Rating: 3/3 (read it!)


Review:
The List has several cheats like The Alexandria Quartet, which is to say items that are not actually novels, but rather a series of novels. This particular instance is definitely not as egregious as A Dance to the Music of Time, coming up in the 40s (so about a decade from now), which is twelve books long. Ha! So what I'd like to say right now is that I reserve the right to quit any of these series if I'm not enjoying them, but I do have to read at least the first book of all of them.

So, then, Justine.

I'm reading The Alexandria Quartet in one big, nearly-900-page volume, partly to enhance the sense of cohesiveness and partly because that's what was at the library. I had essentially no expectations other than extreme arduousness, but I ended up hooked to this book right from the beginning.

The plot is buried under a young Englishman's non-chronological narrated reflection. To quote him:

What I most need to do is to record experiences, not in the order in which they took place—for that is history— but in the order in which they first became significant for me.

This is precisely what he does. In the most basic, crude sense, Nameless Narrator (I love it when first-person narrators don't have names, and I can't explain why) becomes involved with Justine, a married woman who is... well, it's hard to explain. To call her a femme fatale would be to incorrectly state the case, but that's about as close as I can get. There's a lot of discussion of what love is, what we want from other people, what we can give them. The plot, such as it is, involves the couple's efforts and struggles to elude their respective primary partners' notice of their affair.

This sort of dithering and obtuseness would probably frustrate me if not for the fact that Durrell's prose goes down smooOOooth. It's poetic without the obtrusive metaphors that I hate so much. His observations are sharp and meaningful. I found myself sliding over (not skimming, but not paying close attention to) the denser bits with the feeling that I'll have to come back to this book sometime, and that when I do, I'll get something completely different from it.

The weakness of the book is maybe the characters, whose relationships with each other are clear but whose individual personalities are murkier. That's kinda one of the themes of the book, though, so I'm not sure it's actually a weakness.

Balthazar (the title of Book Two) and Clea (the title of Book Four) are both introduced as characters in Justine. They're mostly peripheral to the main action, although I assume several dangling threads will be picked up in the rest of the books. The most mysterious book so far is Mountolive, which comes third, and that name hasn't come up anywhere yet.

- - - - -

She would come a few minutes late of course, fresh from some assignation in a darkened room, from which I avert my mind; but so fresh, so young, the open petal of the mouth that fell upon mine like an unslaked summer. The man she had left might still be going over and over the memory of her; she might be as if still dusted by the pollen of his kisses. Melissa! It mattered so little somehow, feeling the lithe weight of the creature as she leaned on one's arm smiling with the selfless candour of those who had given over with secrets. It was good to stand there, awkward and a little shy, breathing quickly because we knew what we wanted of each other.

- - - - -

...'Comment vous défendez-vous contre la solitude?' he asked her. Melissa turned upon him an eye replete with all the candour of experience and replied softly: 'Monsieur, je suis devenue la solitude même.'

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