Mountolive

This won't be easy for me. If you happened to have read my reviews of the previous two volumes in this Quartet, you will understand. I have the greatest respect for the author's talent, the beauty of his prose, and the depth of his characters. In that sense, "Mountolive" appropriately takes its place in the Quartet.

My struggle is with the overall theme and continuity of the Quartet as a whole. I was overwhelmed by the first volume, "Justine". I found it powerful, beautiful, sad and mysterious. The entire experience touched me deeply. The succeeding volumes seemed to attempt to turn all this around. The series seemed to have lost its semi-existential dimension. Now, we were directed to political intrigue and interpersonal (gossipy?) show more machinations. Some characters lost what dignity they possessed in "Justine".

In retrospect, I wish I had stopped after "Justine". Or, further selfish pipedreams, the author had presented the following three works as a separate series. Both works, "Justine" and the Alexandria Trilogy (separately titled and published) would be immensely valuable (yet distinctly different) works.

No need to make me aware of the hubris my words entail. show less

In this, the third volume of Durrell’s “The Alexandria Quartet,” the narrative shift focuses, this time to Mountolive, a character who has perhaps more in common with the real-life Durrell than even Darley, who narrated both volume I (“Justine”) and will narrate volume IV (“Clea”). Both Durrell and Mountolive were born in India and later joined the Foreign Service abroad.

In this “sibling companion” to the other volumes, we find both more growing political intrigue and romantic machination. Just as “Balthazar” reconstituted and reframed the story of “Justine,” the entry of Mountolive as a major figure does much the same. He begins at the Hosnani estate of where Nessim, Narouz, their mother Leila, and ailing show more father all reside, and we quickly learn of Mountolive and Leila’s love affair. The jumps in time make it somewhat difficult to discern when this occurred (most likely well before the action of volumes I and II), but their relationship is handled every bit as well as the myriad other relationships, romantic and Plutonic, that have arisen. Mountolive takes a job as a British foreign service and hires Pursewarden, a more minor character from the previous two volumes, as one of his advisers. We also learn of a gun cartel that seems to be affiliated in some way with Narouz, whose political influence and rhetoric is becoming too strong for his own good. Mountolive’s knowledge of the gunrunning plot, along with the corruption the Pasha both accepts and participates in, let him leave Egypt, but not before becoming thoroughly disillusioned.

It will come as no surprise to anyone who read my reviews of the first two novels that I have utterly enjoyed “Mountolive,” too. And since I know longer know how to gush about Durrell’s gorgeous, fantastic writing in an original way, I will do what I did in those reviews and leave you with a snippet from the opening chapter detailing Mountolive’s entry into the British Foreign Service and his involvement with Egypt:

“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. Only somehow today it was rather more difficult than usual to be reserved, so exciting has the fish-drive become.”

How can you not love this stuff? show less

Volume III of “The Alexandria Quartet.” As I said in my review of the previous volume, “Durrell is preoccupied with what it means to love someone, how people change over time and, finally, how “truth” depends upon one’s perspective—which, of course, changes over time but and depends on one’s “position” as well.” This volume, written from the perspective of the Mountolive, a British diplomat, is chronologically and narratively (?) straightforward, which is a distinct change of pace from the first two volumes. As did the previous volume, it fills in gaps, answers questions, and creates new ones. All from a new perspective which, of course, has its own view of people and events. The volume aptly illustrates Durrell's show more point about the enormous power of one's vantage point and one's knowledge on one's actions I thought the writing in volume I (Justine) was almost uniformly excellent; in volume II (Balthazar) “occasionally as brilliant as in Justine, but less often so.” The writing here is more quotidian, undoubtedly on purpose—to a point. The question is to what point. I liked the book, just not as much as the previous two volumes. But, again, the work as a whole only seems more remarkable all the time. show less

As we gradually realise the scope of Durrell's literary experiment, in this, the third of the Alexandria novels, it becomes clear how no one human can ever truly know any other human, and it's heartbreaking. Durrell's prose is often too rich, veering into a purple so rich Caesar wouldn't wear it, but for every shot that misses, three hit their mark. Mountolive's drive through the storm is rivaled for beauty only by the dust-storm sequence in "Justine", and the final chapter is a slow, pulsing, vivid depiction of the last moments before death. I'll probably give myself a few weeks to cleanse the palate before reading the final volume in the series, but I'm a Durrell convert for life, I can tell.

The conflict between duty and personal relationships. Mountolive does what the second book could not: freed from Darley's narration and shifted to a third person perspective, it casts the first book in a new light rather than merely adding to its layers. It has the power to stand on its own, although anyone skipping the first two novels would cost this one its ability to surprise. Even Balthazar, it seems, was often treading in the dark. At first it reads only like the next link in a chain as Mountolive's story builds on our introduction to Nessim's family. Then as Pursewarden, Nessim and Justine receive further illumination, it folds back in on itself.

At the same time as the puzzle box reveals its extra facets, however, in bringing show more clarity to vagueness it also brings the prosaic to the artful. Darley is largely dismissed behind his back, but for the reader to do the same would be to brush away the slick presentation that Durrell brought to his first novel and (to a lesser degree) the second. This third is more fun and easy to read, but it is also more conventional and lacks the same depth. I regret Durrell had the casual propensity of tossing the "N" word into the mix. It disturbed my easy enjoyment of what's otherwise the best entertainment value of the quartet so far, if not the most skillful. show less

Mountolive is the third member of the Alexandria Quartet. The narrator of Justine and Balthazar (previously unnamed but now called Darley) appears as a minor character in this book, but this is a more conventional novel in structure, using a disembodied narrator and taking the British diplomat, David Mountolive as the main point-of-view character. It takes us for a third time through the events described in Justine, but shifts the emphasis to a much broader, politically-oriented view, so that the epic love story at the centre of Justine becomes a minor, background incident. Although set in the thirties, this is very clearly a novel written in the aftermath of the Suez fiasco, exploring the dangers inherent in the pro-Arab policy of the show more British government before the war.

The early chapters set on the feudal estates of the Coptic Hosnani family have an almost Russian flavour to them (possibly deliberate, as Durrell then briefly switches the scene to the British embassy in Moscow); by the end of the book we are back in a sordid Graham-Greeneland of bribery and espionage.

The odd thing about this book, perhaps, is that you could easily read it and get a great deal of pleasure out of it without knowing a thing about the two earlier books. If you are reading them in sequence, you get the additional interest of seeing the actions and motivations of the story revised and undermined yet again, with whatever that tells you about the instability of narrative authority. Possibly because Durrell isn't writing in the persona of Darley any more, there is less self-conscious overwriting, although there are still more quotable phrases per page than one is altogether comfortable with. Sadly, Scobie, the most vivid of the minor characters in the earlier books, is absent, but we still have a few scenes with Pombal, while the novelist Pursewarden really comes into his own here. show less

This third novel in the Alexandria Quartet switches to a different narrator from the previous two and changes quite dramatically in style. Durrell's prose is still beautiful and engaging, but I didn't find this novel nearly as enjoyable as the previous two.

Of the three books I've read so far in the quartet, all of them have a layer of dismissive colonial racism in them and a similar current of misogyny. The first two books were good enough for this to spoil but not break them, whereas this novel seems more offensive more frequently, and combined with the change in style it just isn't an enjoyable or recommendable book.