Lawrence Durrell
Alexandria Quartet

Lawrence George Durrell (1912 – 1990) was an expatriate British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer.
His most famous work the Alexandria Quartet a tetralogy of novels was published between 1957-1960.
A critical and commercial success, the books present four perspectives on a single set of events and characters in Alexandria, Egypt, before and during World War II.
As Durrell explains in his preface to Balthazar, the four novels are an exploration of relativity and the notions of continuum and subject-object relation, with modern love as the subject. The Quartet offers the same sequence of events to us through several points of view, allowing individual perspectives to change over time.
The four novels are: Justine(1957)Balthazar(1958)Mountolive (1958)Clea(1960)
The novels, given their dense complexity, were written (compelled by pressing money worries) in an extraordinary short space of time.
Justine took about four months, Balthazar six weeks, Mountolive was completed in two months and Clea, in just seven weeks.
Although Durrell was born a decade earlier than his near contemporaries, John Wain, Kingsley Amis, John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, and John Osborne, his sequence of novels was published at roughly the same time as, ‘Take a Girl Like You’: Amis (1957) ‘Room at the Top’: Braine (1957) ‘Look Back In Anger’: Osborne (1956) ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’: Sillitoe (1958).
His ‘high art’ aesthetic makes no concessions on the reader, but the demands it makes are rewarded with writing which is both sensuous and superbly evocative of the ‘Spirit of Place’, Alexandria.
The city, that the poet Cavafy knew so well, (his unnamed presence pervades the novels, and several of his poems are featured in the text) is conjured up in all it’s extravagant sensuality.
Durrell’s characters are fabulous birds of paradise, brilliantly placed in the exotic setting of Alexandria; the comparison with the collection of dowdy sparrows, that inhabit the work of his peers, and whose actions take place in London, Nottingham and Bradford, is invidious.
It is impossible to understand Durrell without seeing him as he saw himself; a European. As he explains in the Paris Review Interview of 1959, his heroes were Lawrence, Richard Aldington, Robert Graves, Norman Douglas and T.S.Eliot; all considered themselves as Europeans first, and only then as British citizens.
Compare that to the parochial outlook enshrined in the next generation of British writers, the so called ‘Angry Young Men’; eschewing any form of glamour and the exotic and reveling in the dull and depressing, they epitomized everything that Durrell characterized ‘The English Death’. As he explained, ‘English life is really like an autopsy. It is so, so dreary.’
It has been pointed out that alongside the central character of Darley (who seems to represent Durrell), and who narrates three of the books, at least three other important figures in the Quartet are writers. Of these the most controversial is the novelist Pursewarden. His portrayal, as the high priest of aestheticism, scattering aphorisms and philosophical and artistic pronouncements whenever he appears, borders on caricature, and at times it is difficult to accept that his pretensions are meant to be taken seriously; nonetheless he, along side the cross-dressing rogue Scobie, and the alluring Jewess Justine (ref. to de Sade) remain wonderfully memorable characters.
Durrell’s prose used throughout the series of novels, describing the sexual couplings and political intrigues; the evocation of the streets and cafe’s of Alexandria; the atmosphere of it’s surrounding countryside, the sea, islands and the Mareotic Lake, is startling visual, ornate and intricately worked.
Particularly in the first novel, Justine, Durrell allows his poetic sensibilities to flow unrestrained and saturate the text with beautiful imagery, that has an almost febrile intensity.
The highly ornate and sensuous narrative voice which Durrell used drew much critical attention. George Steiner described the Quartet's style as "complex aural music" in which "light seems to play across the surface of the words in a brilliant tracery." The "baroque" style was not to everyone's taste though; Martin Green complained that "a steady diet of [Durrell's] sentences ... makes one feel one is sickening for a bad cold."
Durrell himself is critical of his ornate style. In answer to the question posed in ‘The Paris Review’, ‘that his prose seems so highly worked. Does it just come out like that?’ he replied. ‘It’s too juicy. Perhaps I need a few money terrors and things to make it a bit clearer - less lush. I always feel I am overwriting. I am conscious of the fact that it is one of my major difficulties. It comes of indecision when you are not sure of your target.....For instance, a lot of poems of my middle period got too corpulent.’
Despite this self-critical attitude, Durrell rightfully takes his place with such supreme modern prose stylists as Nabokov, Updike and John Banville. Each of whom has their detractors; criticized as favouring style over substance, and with the additional accusation of being too elitist and esoteric. Nevertheless to the appreciative connoisseur the Alexandria Quartet presents a great artist at work using the full palette of his genius, and creating an intoxicating mixture of sensual imagery and unforgettable characters. ( )

Absolutely wonderful. Just thinking about the series makes me want to read it again, and it must be years since I have. ( )

I read this and it damn near ruined my writing. I was working on a book at the time, and in comparison, I felt like giving up. At the very least, I felt what I was writing was simplistic, so I added a whole other layer of narrative. Bad idea! Durrell does what Durrell does, and only he can do it. Luxuriate in this quartet. I haven't read it for quite some time -- but I recall being most blown away by the earliest books -- and then, as if I were chasing a dream of paradise -- I kept on seeking the same ecstasy. However, well worth it in every way. I am still haunted by the evocative and dramatic scenes of mourning. Other countries seem so much better at it than we.

One of those books which is very good on characterisation, with believable characters and which has an impact. I first read this 24 years ago and have re-read it twice, and am about to re-read it. Good on location and economic and political climate too. ( )