Roger Brunyate 2008-06-19
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Half-way through this book, I must confess, I was about to put it aside as hopelessly esoteric and self-indulgent. But the last 100 pages began to take a different character, and by the time I came to the great duck hunt (an almost Tolstoyan set piece that contains the main action of the novel), I couldn't put it down. And I found myself so moved by the brief final section, which bids a temporary farewell to the more important characters, that I went straight to the bookstore to buy the other three novels that make up Durrell's ALEXANDRIA QUARTET. Now fifty pages into BALTHAZAR, the second of them, I feel as though a landscape previously endured under a haze of oppressive heat has been revealed in fresh light under a clear blue sky.
THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET came out in paperback at about the time I was entering university, and my friends and I bought the first volume or two, probably in the hope that reading such an erudite work would brand us as card-carrying intellectuals, besides being all about sex. I rather think we failed to get beyond a few dozen pages, and were certainly disappointed in the sex. Though Durrell chose Alexandria for its polyglot decadence: "Five races, five languages, a dozen creeds; five fleets turning through their greasy reflections behind the harbour bar. But there are more than five sexes and only demotic Greek seems to distinguish between them." He stirs a potent cocktail that includes most of those races and languages. Although the later books seem less opaque, JUSTINE assumes that the reader can handle expressions in Arabic, quotations in Latin, and sometimes whole exchanges in French; even its English vocabulary sent me several times to the dictionary ("banausic" anyone?). Reading the books now, I am amazed at the degree of sophistication that even a highbrow author could assume of his readers in the 1950s, though I suspect that Durrell always intended to give the impression of superior knowledge; that remark about demotic Greek is surely just showing off.
Certainly sex is everywhere in Durrell's Alexandria, in many different forms, gay or straight, for payment and without. But, as compared to his friend and former house-mate, Durrell was much less interested in describing the physical aspects. His main theme in JUSTINE is the apparent separation of sex from friendship on the one hand and spiritual love on the other. His various flavors of half-fidelities and adulteries would have meant little to us at that age. But they do ring more true when one understands more of the blind alleys and detours we allow ourselves to tread in the search for some elusive ideal. JUSTINE is one of the least titillating erotic books I can imagine, but its pervasive sadness can shade into sympathy and even wisdom.
I returned to JUSTINE immediately after reading another novel written by a poet: DIVISADERO by Michael Ondaatje (whose ENGLISH PATIENT also contains scenes of adulterous love in Egypt at almost the same period). But the two writers are very different; Ondaatje's language works by paragraphs or pages; Durrell's at the level of the individual word or phrase. Ondaatje paints pictures which separate themselves from the words that evoked them. With Durrell, however, pictures, characters, ideas are all subsumed in the same perfumed language; his is an intoxicating voice; you either walk out on it or surrender. But he is good; listen to his description of a lake at dusk: "When the engines of the hydroplanes are turned off the silence is suddenly filled with groaning and gnatting of duck." And again at dawn: "And on all sides now comes the rich plural chuckle of duck and the shrill pitched note of the gulls to the seaboard." The opening of the next book, BALTHAZAR, gives an even better idea of his extraordinary use of words, highly-colored but verging on the over-ripe:
"Landscape tones: brown to bronze, steep skyline, low cloud, pearl ground with shadowed oyster and violet reflections. The lion-dust of desert: prophets' tombs turned to zinc and copper at sunset on the ancient lake. Its huge sand-faults like watermarks from the air; green and citron giving to gunmetal, to a single plum-dark sail, moist, palpitant: sticky-winged nymph. Taposiris is dead among its tumbling columns and seamarks, vanished the Harpoon Men . . . Mareotis under a sky of hot lilac."
Durrell's language is both the brilliance of the book and its greatest liability. Elsewhere, he writes disparagingly of a journalist whose profession had "trained him to stay on the superficies of real life (acts and facts about acts)." With Durrell (as with Proust, surely his spiritual mentor), acts and facts are revealed sparingly and told out of sequence; the important action is all internal. But from whose perspective? When all language is equally charged, the only inner life that comes through clearly is that of the unnamed wordsmith. Or are we hearing the voice of the city, with the narrator as its mouthpiece? Perhaps. Alexandria is intoxicating, but enervating. The part of the book that I find truly moving is at the very end, when many of the characters have left. Justine in Palestine, Clea in Syria, Nessim returning from Kenya, the narrator en route to self-imposed exile on a lonely Greek island -- these few rain-washed glimpses suddenly make me care enough about them as people to read the next book, and the next, and the next.
