Menace, mystery and decadence

It is fitting that Charles Dickens’s bicentenary coincides with Lawrence Durrell’s centenary, for the two novelists have crucial resemblances: both of them are triumphant in the intensity and power of their writing, but capable of calamitous lapses of taste; both of them are riotous comedians who sometimes plunge into hopeless melodrama. It is true that Einstein’s theory of relativity, which Durrell foisted on the structure of The Alexandria Quartet (reprinted, with a new introduction by Jan Morris) has no more part in Martin Chuzzlewit than the ludicrous sexual obsessions derived from Sade and Henry Miller which sully Durrell’s plot. But Dickens in certain moods was, as Angus Wilson said of Durrell’s novels, ‘floridly vulgar’.

Justine, the first volume of the quartet, was published by Faber in 1957. The successor volumes (Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea), which Durrell called ‘siblings’ rather than ‘sequels’, appeared by 1960. Each sibling overlaps and amends: different narrators correct each other, shift emphasis, analyse protagonists differently, provide revelations from fresh perspectives. In an afterword Durrell wrote, ‘I have always believed in letting my reader sink or skim.’ Certainly, one needs to skim, for his narrative is sometimes overblown, his protagonist Justine is as improbable as her namesake in Sade, and the motives and reactions of her satellite characters resemble a queasy adolescent daydream too closely to convince.

Mountolive is the most readable and satisfying of the quartet. Its depiction of office politics and diplomatic intrigue (its eponymous hero is British Ambassador in Egypt) is written with delicious irony. In Mountolive Durrell finally roots his characters, makes one understand and care about some of them, and consummates his design.