: The Alexandria Quartet
Barbara Durlacher introduces us to Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, a narrative seen from a variety of viewpoints, set in pre-World War Two Egypt.
This quartet of novels were published nearly fifty years ago, but on re-reading them I was interested to see they have weathered the time-span surprisingly well, and still contain much of interest.
Set in Egypt immediately prior to World War Two the books are collectively known as The Alexandria Quartet. They were published between 1957 and 1960 in the following order - Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea.
Author Lawrence Durrell's brother Gerald was famous for his work in saving endangered animals. Gerald was way before his time and could be said to have started the movement to protect the ever-diminishing number of smaller animal species, as well as bringing to the notice of the general public the importance of the chain of life and a realisation of how we humans have no right to take the lives of creatures with no defence against our greed and insensitivity. With the proceeds of his books and lecture tour, Gerald founded a small animal Zoo on Jersey, in the Channel Islands, which, with an good location and attractive buildings, is a fine example of what an ideal zoo should be.
Both brothers have written fictionalised and non-fiction accounts of their lives in Greece and the Middle East. Lawrence was the more poetic writer of the two. He was a British civil servant, spent his childhood in Greece, and lived in the Middle East for a number of years, so had an intimate grasp of the intrigues and hidden forces influencing the political scene at in the times of which he writes.
The Alexandria Quartet was an imaginative attempt to create a four-part fugue in which the same set of circumstances are seen from different points of view. The complicated story is, like a fugue, interwoven between the protagonists, builds to a climax, and then is resolved. His depiction of imaginary personalities of Alexandrian society gives an extraordinary flavour to the places he describes, as well as creating the foetid hothouse atmosphere of life in an immensely wealthy Egyptian household of the time.
Some of the writing is overblown, but Durrell's descriptive passages, such as the duck shoot on Lake Mareotis on the outskirts of Alexandria, the house of the child prostitutes, the fancy-dress ball and the sojourn on the Greek on a Greek island,] are excellent. They give an idea of what life was like in the days before mass tourism and the American way of life set such a stamp of conformity on everything.
A bad movie was made of the Quartet some years ago. French actress Anouk Aimee was Justine. The original story line was so mutilated as to be almost unrecognisable.
