The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea

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This celebrated tetralogy from the 1950s was defined by its author as ‘an investigation of modern love’, but has often been regarded by its readers more as an evocation of a city – the Greco-Arab, multi-ethnic Alexandria of its title. Almost infinite variations of love are certainly explored in its 1000-odd pages, and the presence of Alexandria certainly permeates the work, but for myself I think the legendary fascination of the Quartet is essentially existential. The work itself is greater than its themes, and casts a spell that is neither precisely emotional nor specifically topographic.

Actually it is neither specific nor precise about almost anything. It was an experimental novel of its day, perhaps related to the work of Durrell’s friend Henry Miller, perhaps to Ulysses. It was based upon the premise that people and events seem different when considered from different angles and periods, and that they can best be recorded, as Durrell himself put it, stereoscopically. The four volumes concern the same characters, but several narrators tell its complex tales from their several viewpoints, and they write at different times. It is a device, Durrell claimed, amounting to a new concept of reality, reflecting the ideas of Freud and Einstein and a convergence of Western and Eastern metaphysics.

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