The Story:
Justine. A young Anglo-Irish writer, L. G. Darley, reflects on his life in Alexandria, Egypt, around the time of World War II, and on his three great loves: Melissa, Justine, and Clea. Darley resides on a Greek island, writing and gaining perspective on his love affairs.
He first recalls Melissa, a poor cabaret dancer who sometimes engaged in prostitution. They begin their love affair as “fellow bankrupts”: He is a writer who cannot write, and she is a dancer with no talent. They have nothing in common, except that they have both been through Alexandria’s “winepress of love.”
While living with Melissa, Darley meets his second great love, Justine, who attends one of his lectures on Alexandria’s famous poet, Constantine Cavafy. Justine, “solitary student of the passions and the arts,” is a modern incarnation of Cleopatra. She captivates men with her esoteric searchings into the nature of knowledge and with her magnificent body. After the lecture, Justine invites Darley to her home, so that he can meet her husband, Nessim, a fabulously wealthy Coptic banker, who also shares in her metaphysical speculations.
Although Darley respects Nessim, he cannot refrain from falling into an affair with Justine. She rules his mind to such an extent that Darley seeks insight into her nature from the novel Moeurs, written by Justine’s ex-husband, Arnauti. In Moeurs, Arnauti created an emotionally complex character like Justine, who was sexually abused by an uncle. Arnauti fails to unravel Justine’s secrets, and Darley, too, is tormented by the decline in Justine’s affections and by his belief that Nessim learns of the affair. Tensions reach a climax at a duck shoot that Nessim arranges at Lake Mareotis. Darley fears that he will be murdered by the jealous husband. Instead, another body is found floating in the lake. The corpse turns out to be Capodistria, the relative who abused Justine. When the hunters return to shore, they discover that Justine fled. Darley feels as if the whole city crashes around his ears. Later, Darley hears through Clea that Justine is working on a Jewish kibbutz in Palestine and that Capodistria is still alive.
Darley takes a job teaching English at a school in Upper Egypt for two years and keeps in only limited contact with Melissa, who is in a clinic to cure her tuberculosis. Melissa dies before Darley can see her for a last time. He agrees to adopt her child, who is the issue of Melissa’s brief liaison with Nessim after Justine’s departure.
By the end of the novel, Darley draws closer to Clea, a lovely artist who is recovering from a lesbian affair with Justine. Together Clea and Darley analyze the events that have transpired, recalling the wisdom of their enigmatic literary friend, Percy Pursewarden, who recently committed suicide.
Balthazar. On the Greek island, Darley completes his manuscript, presumably Justine, and mails it to his friend, Balthazar. Balthazar knows the secrets of his fellow Alexandrians. After reading Darley’s book, Balthazar travels to the island to set Darley straight and present him with his own commentary—the Interlinear—penned between the lines of Darley’s manuscript. The Interlinear provides Darley with new information regarding the characters about whom he wrote. One revelation is that Justine’s true love is Pursewarden. Darley is stunned, forced to take a new perspective on his reality, an essential task for one who aspires to be a writer. After Balthazar departs, Darley picks up an old photograph and stares at the images of his friends. He is ready to begin the torturous process of reassessment by examining the many facets of his friends’ personalities.
There is a wild carnival attended by Narouz Hosnani, Nessim’s brother. Narouz, a rough-hewn religious fanatic, manages the family’s country estate. He attends the carnival because he hopes to see his great secret love, Clea, who loathes him. Instead, he murders a man, in the guise of Justine, who made lecherous advances to him.
This volume closes with a letter that Pursewarden writes to Clea just before his suicide. He proposes “a new way of living with joy” and calls for relationships based on loving-kindness.
Mountolive. The British ambassador to Egypt is David Mountolive. The omniscient narrator chronicles Mountolive’s life—how he began his diplomatic career in Egypt as a guest at the Hosnani estate and rose through the ranks to become ambassador. The Hosnanis, particularly Leila, Nessim and Narouz’s mother, give the young Mountolive his education in Egyptian mores. Mountolive falls in love with Leila and carries on a passionate affair with her out of sight of her disabled husband. When he is posted elsewhere, they stay in touch through letters. With the passage of years their ardor fades. Their meeting, after Mountolive was appointed ambassador, is a disaster. He is repulsed by how much she aged, and she is disappointed in his lack of character.
More knowledge is gained regarding Justine’s true affections. She is, in fact, Nessim’s devoted wife. She shares Nessim’s political goal: to conspire against British interests in Palestine. She becomes involved with Darley and Pursewarden, both minor functionaries in the British legation, in order to spy for Nessim. The plot falls apart when Melissa inadvertently stumbles onto its details and informs Pursewarden during the one night of passion they shared. He, in turn, faces a dilemma, torn between his friendship with Nessim and his official duties. His suicide appears to be a way out of the quandary; before dying he lets both Nessim and Mountolive know that he uncovered the conspiracy.
Retribution arrives swiftly. Nessim was bribing the minister of the interior, Memlik, to overlook his activities, but learning of the plot, Mountolive forces Memlik to suppress it. Memlik decides to spare Nessim and sends his agents to kill the other leader, Nessim’s fanatical brother, Narouz. Narouz suffers an agonizing death. His last request is to see Clea again. She reluctantly goes to his deathbed but arrives too late.
Clea. Darley leaves his island retreat to return to Alexandria and is nervous about seeing Justine again. She is much changed. The collapse of the conspiracy made her a recluse, and a slight stroke diminished her beauty. Darley realizes he has grown beyond her narcissistic type of loving. He is more in tune with the gentle Clea, who, like him, is struggling to become an artist. Clea and Darley begin a love affair amid the shelling of World War II.
Inexplicably, Clea and Darley drift apart. They decide to separate, but, before doing so, they go on one last excursion. Accompanied by Balthazar, they travel by boat to a nearby island. As Clea is swimming underwater, Balthazar accidentally releases a harpoon which goes through Clea’s hand and pins her underwater. Darley springs to save Clea’s life by hacking off her hand.
Although the two separate, they seem likely to reunite. Both resolve their artistic problems: Darley is able to start writing, and Clea is painting extraordinary canvases with her artificial hand. She writes to Darley that she is “serene and happy, a real human being, an artist at last.” Darley, too, feels as if “the whole universe” has given him “a nudge.”
Critical Evaluation:
Beginning with the publication of Lawrence Durrell’s first serious novel, The Black Book, in 1938, perceptive readers recognized his innovative genius. T. S. Eliot praised The Black Book as “the first piece of work by a new English writer to give me any hope for the future of prose fiction.” The Alexandria Quartet marks a turning point in the development of the twentieth century novel. In its pages, modernism makes the transition into postmodernism. Modernist concerns with the privileged role of art, the mythic quest, and the hero’s search for meaning give way to postmodern concerns: indeterminacy, relativity, and the hero’s unstable ego.
The Alexandria Quartet is experimental in style and metaphysical in content, so readers are often confused by the lack of narrative structure. Durrell is a meticulous craftsman; the novel is based on what he calls an n-dimensional structure, based in turn on Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. The theory of relativity, Durrell believed, accurately defines the reality of time. Einstein destroyed the old Victorian material universe. Science shattered any coherent view of the cosmos, Durrell points out in the preface to Balthazar. Modern literature therefore offers no unities either. The book’s relativity in its point of view is a reflection of the central advance made in human understanding in the twentieth century. Thus, the first three novels of The Alexandria Quartet present three dimensions of space, and the last novel, Clea, moves the story ahead in time. How the reader should, ideally, read such a novel is illustrated by a cartoon, which appeared around the time of The Alexandria Quartet’s publication. A man is shown reading The Alexandria Quartet by means of a machine that allows him to read all four volumes simultaneously.
In addition to incorporating relativistic ideas into his novel, Durrell suggests that Sigmund Freud destroyed the idea of the stable ego. Describing such a personality in fiction or in love is complicated by the fact that many perspectives can be taken on the subject. Balthazar points out this notion to Darley: “Each psyche is really an ant-hill of opposing predispositions. Personality as something with fixed attributes is an illusion—but a necessary illusion if we are to love!”
By focusing on love relationships in The Alexandria Quartet, Durrell addresses issues raised by Freud and Einstein. The central topic of the novel is an investigation of modern love. Durrell believed that “the sexual act becomes identified with all knowledge.” In other words, eros is the “motive force” in humans. Eros awakens the “psychic forces latent in the human being.” Durrell’s characters are interesting in their own right, but they are also metaphysical pawns in the search for metaphysical knowledge. Such knowledge must take into account the cosmology of the age: Personality is not fixed, and space and time are relative. Thus, Darley’s adventures in love are the key elements in his progression toward greater self-awareness and knowledge not only of himself but also of the world around him.
His first lover, Melissa Artemis, encounters him at his lowest point of self-awareness. They meet at a party. Melissa has passed out, from exhaustion and from the ingestion of Spanish fly. Darley takes her home and nurses her back to health. They begin a relationship based on the fact that they are “fellow bankrupts,” without a “taste in common.”
During this period with Melissa, Darley gives a lecture on Constantine Cavafy. After the lecture, a beautiful society woman approaches him with questions. This woman is Justine, who becomes his second great love. Justine is married to the immensely wealthy Coptic Christian banker Nessim Hosnani. Darley is instantly intrigued by the dark Justine, who has the remarkable ability to expel “people from their old selves.” Darley is willing to be led and follows after Justine, despite the fact that he meets her husband and strikes up a friendship with him. When Justine abruptly leaves both of them, Darley is forced to reevaluate the relationship and himself; this act increases his awareness of self and others.
Darley seeks solace in his third and most important relationship, with the painter Clea Montis, who also suffered through a sexual relationship with Justine. Darley and Clea work together as they attempt to determine the right way to live as artists and as human beings. Rejecting the ego-dominated, narcissistic concerns of their past lives, they try to live a more tender existence, which their mentor, Pursewarden, claims exists in the “primal relation between animal and plant, rain and soil, seed and trees, man and God.”
Before Clea and Darley reach this state of being, however, they must pass through a terrible trial. When Clea is accidentally shot by a harpoon, Darley must suddenly transform himself from a man sunk in passivity to a man of action. In saving Clea’s life, he transforms himself as well. By the end of The Alexandria Quartet, his self-awareness and confidence allow him to take his place in the community of authors.
Durrell’s goal in the novel is twofold: First, he attempts to address the major philosophical questions regarding the nature of reality and the right way to live and love, and second, he shows that there is an ideal spiritual realm in which to live. Durrell believes in an existence that abandons selfish cravings and ambitions and that enters a state of oneness with the universe. His characters begin their journeys in Alexandria but metaphorically become reflections of their age.