Darley Takes a Break

Mountolive volume three of the Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell.  Faber.  884 pp. *****

The most startling thing about Mountolive is that all of a sudden we have no narrator.  Darley—who told his own story in the first volume, then absorbed corrections from Balthazar in the second—is nowhere in evidence, though he’s mentioned occasionally in passing.  His sensibility has dominated the quartet.  Suddenly we’re reading a third-person novel about a character who’s barely been mentioned in the past.  It’s as if Durrell got tired of his unreliable narrator and decided to take over.  In a letter to Henry Miller, Durrell said, “This big novel is as tame and naturalistic in form as a Hardy; yet it is the fulcrum of the quartet and the rationale of the thing.”

David Mountolive when he first appears is a young British man training for the foreign service, living in the home of the Hosnani family.  He is roughly the same age as the brothers Nessim and Narouz, who were central to the first two volumes, Nessim as the husband of Justine, who dominates the quartet, and Narouz as the brother who oversees the family’s considerable agricultural interests, and is secretly in love with the artist Clea, finally confessing his love in the last scene of volume two.  Mountolive begins at a much earlier time, before either of these men has taken his ultimate role in the family.

Their father—debilitated and crippled by a degenerative illness—is in a wheelchair, and Narouz oversees his care.  Their mother Leila is considerably younger than their father, and has not contracted smallpox and begun the solitary life we saw her living in Balthazar.  In fact as her sons are hosting and sometimes hanging out with their young British guest, she starts having an affair with him.  She makes the first pass.

She claims she does that with her husband’s permission, though I must say I wondered.  She also seems to be having the affair with the knowledge of her sons, which is even more startling.  The whole thing looks like a ticking time bomb.

But the crisis isn’t what we’d think.  One evening Hosnani pere explodes in anger at his young guest, not—apparently—because of the affair, but because of a casual remark he makes.  The issue is that the British have sympathized so much with the Muslims in Egypt that they’ve alienated every other group.  In particular, Coptic Christians—of whom the Hosnani’s are a prominent family—were once honored members of the society, prominent in governance, but are now almost entirely excluded.  He is bitter about that fact, bitter at the British specifically.  And though the rest of the family tries to muffle his outburst—the situation is hardly Mountolive’s fault—they don’t seem to disagree.

David eventually moves along, and the novel follows his postings elsewhere and his gradual return to Egypt as a middle-aged man, ready to assume the role of ambassador.  (In the course of this story we come across the fascinating fact—at least to me—that Mountolive’s father, who was also in the foreign service, decided when he retired not to return to England with his wife, but to become a Buddhist monk, and is a noted translator of the Pali Canon.)  There is just one problem: a British official named Maskelyne reports that Nessim Hosnani, who by now is a prominent businessman—is engaged in underhanded dealings with a foreign power that go against British interests.  Another member of the British foreign service—the novelist Pursewarden, who was a minor character in Justine but became important in Balthazar—disagrees, or perhaps doesn’t want to believe such a thing of his friend Nessim.  Mountolive, who knows both Nessim and Pursewarden, sides with his friends, and relieves Maskelyne of his post.

The scene in which Pursewarden discovers he is wrong, and Maskelyne right, is one of the simplest and most brilliant in the novel.  He is with Darley’s girlfriend Melissa, a dancer and part-time prostitute whom we had almost forgotten from volume one.  Though Pursewarden knows Darley, and has just spoken to him, he pays Melissa to come back to his place and have sex.

Once they’re there, he has trouble performing, and she tells him, quite accurately, that he is closed up, while Darley—her true love, who himself is in love with Justine—is wide open.  This slovenly dancer and part-time prostitute has read the man’s character perfectly.  Pursewarden confesses to her, in a startling moment, why he is closed down.  It was a fact that was right before our eyes but we didn’t see it.  And it is Melissa who knows, not only that Justine and the Hosnanis are using Darley, but that Nessim engaged in behavior traitorous to his own government and to the British as well.  That evening—which began as a casual pick-up in a bar—stops Pursewarden cold.

The next night he commits suicide, an act which seemed inexplicable in Justine.  But I have a feeling that Pursewarden’s real problem, the thing that made him so dark and cynical (though he is obviously bright and brilliant) is the secret fact he reveals to Melissa.  It is the source of his self-hatred.

The first three books in this quartet, in which we see the same story again and again, each time in a deeper way, are fascinating in their complexity.  The story deepens every time we get new details, but in volume three it plummets to the sub-basement.  There are places throughout these volumes where I felt Durrell was going on a little long, exercising his considerable lyrical skills just because he could, but I’m actually not sure that’s true, as detail after detail becomes important.  Apparently in Clea—whose title character might be the most intriguing in the whole series—we move ahead in time.  Readers who were following the series as it came out were left on the edge of their seats.  We don’t need to wait.