You Got It All Wrong

Balthazar book two of the Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. Faber.  884 pp.  $16.95.

This is a brilliant idea for a series of novels.  Kudos to Lawrence Durrell for even thinking of it.  But then for the man who conceived it to have a superb poetic style, an interest in religion and psychology and just about every field of human endeavor: it’s almost too much to ask.  He apparently had the idea from the beginning, because he announces in Justine that it was the first of a group of novels.  He conceived of it this way.

What I had always heard was that the Alexandria Quartet was the same story told from four different points of view.  In a way that is true, at least for the second volume.  But the narrator hasn’t changed.  It’s still this mysterious guy living on a Greek island with a little child (in this novel he’s finally given a name, Darley), caring for the child during the day and writing by night.  But a friend from the Alexandria days has read the first novel, and come to tell him how wrong he was about a number of things.  He’s actually annotated the original text extensively, but also talks with Darley about the story.  And what he says is fascinating.

This commentator is Balthazar, who seemed to be the most knowing person in Justine.  He is a convenor of an interreligious group studying what they call (and spell) the Cabala; I definitely hope we eventually hear more about that.  But he also just seems to know everyone, and to know about their private lives.  If there’s one person in this series I’d like to sit down and talk with, it’s Balthazar.

Justine was about Darley’s obsession with Justine, the beautiful sensual Jewess who was married to a wealthy Coptic Christian, Nessim.  Since Darley was writing, and we were getting things only from his point of view, the story stayed focused, and while there were fascinating characters in the wings, they didn’t get their due.  Balthazar comes in and shifts the perspective.  He lets Darley know that his obsession blinded him to some rather surprising things.  The first is that the often-promiscuous Justine was in love, not with Darley, but with Pursewarden, the cynical but brilliant novelist who committed suicide in the middle of the first volume.

That suicide now seems more puzzling than ever.  Pursewarden was a sophisticated man of the world but also a hugely talented novelist, possibly a great one.  (There are two novelists in the text other than Darley, and he liberally quotes from their books and bon mots, which Durrell is apparently creating himself.  It’s as if the Quartet is a hall of mirrors; you’re never sure who’s who.  Pursewarden, for instance, is known for including epigraphs from the Marquis de Sade, whom he describes as the ultimate rationalist (?), but Durrell’s epigraphs are also from de Sade, who of course wrote a famous novel titled Justine.)  Pursewarden had a relationship with Justine but seemed more interested in seducing and controlling her than getting to know her.  He killed himself at the apogee of his career, after just publishing a novel—the third in a trilogy—entitled God Is a Humorist.  The man is an enigma.

Balthazar also knows much more about the relationship between Justine and her husband, Nessim.  Justine was raised more in poverty than I realized (or remembered); she was a street urchin when she suffered the sexual abuse that marked the rest of her life.  Nessim obviously adored her, but she confessed when he proposed that she did not love him.  It was his hope that, over time, friendship and respect might develop into love.  He married her knowing she wasn’t fully in the marriage, and that she had a checkered past.

We actually see him going home to tell his brother Narouz and their mother about this decision.  Nessim is in charge of the family’s banking and financial interests, but Narouz runs their agricultural interests, which are just as vast.  He is a man of huge energy and talent, but his appearance is marred by a severe cleft palate that was never repaired, so he doesn’t appear in society.  The mother of these men was once a great beauty whose own marriage was a little iffy—she loved another man, named Mountolive—but has been disfigured by smallpox and now lives in seclusion in a small house where she has a pet cobra.  (It is considered improper in their culture to kill a snake, even if it invades your home.)  Nessim—one of the most powerful men in Egypt—is nevertheless too afraid of his mother to announce his marriage himself, so he asks his brother to do it.  She can’t understand why he is marrying a Jewess, and is mildly annoyed.[1]

This novel, then, has more of the exoticism we might have expected from a novel set in Alexandria, and becomes even more exotic when Narouz vows to his brother to find out what happened to Justine’s daughter from her first marriage, whom Justine believes to have been kidnapped.  The scene where Narouz does so is a long set-piece where he confronts a holy man who has such power that he is able to instantly hypnotize people and make them do his bidding.  His spiritual power is dangerous.  But to Narouz’s question, he draws a circle in the dirt and tells him to focus on the dirt, and Narouz has a vision of what happened to the girl.

This scene, in a novel which up to that time has been entirely realistic, is nevertheless convincing.  It was daring of Durrell to even include it.  From my standpoint he pulls it off.

There is much more of interest in this book, but I’ve already said enough, except for one last thing.  The only character possibly more intriguing than Balthazar is Clea, whose name graces the fourth novel (the third, intriguingly, is Mountolive).  She is a painter, apparently bisexual, who also lives an entirely solitary life, like others in these novels; she seems, like Balthazar, to be a person in the know.  Narouz is secretly in love with her, though he has seen her only a few times.  In the final scene of Balthazar he confesses his love.  But he does that in circumstances so unusual that it would be wrong to even hint at them.  It’s a brilliant last scene, and it ends in the voice of Clea.

My admiration for these books is unbounded.  I’m giving myself a brief break in the middle, just so I don’t rush through.  reading a nonfiction book like a sorbet to clear the palate.  But I look forward to continuing the feast.

[1] It’s the familiar situation that Ray Charles sang about in a song.  “Mama told me I should let you go, but there’s somethin’ about you that Mama don’t know.”