The Alexandria Quartet (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea) by Lawrence Durrell

Pursewarden, one of the novelists who appears as a character in Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, explains to Darley, another novelist who appears, an idea he has about how a novel might be written: 

The narrative momentum forward is counter-sprung by references backwards in time, giving the impression of a book which is not travelling from a to b but standing above time and turning slowly on its own axis to comprehend the whole pattern. Things do not all lead forward to other things: some lead backwards to things which have passed. A marriage of past and present with the flying multiplicity of the future racing towards one.

This is an apt description of what Durrell (not Darley), the novelist who has created these characters, has, over the four novels of the quartet, done. Pursewarden also notes that though the structure of the novel would be ambitious, the story need not be anything "very recherche . . . . Just an ordinary Girl Meets Boy story."

That, indeed, is what we get in the first novel in the quartet, Justine. The story, though, is complicated by the subsequent novels which are laid palimpsest-like (the word "palimpsest" comes up often in discussions of the quartet) over Justine. In the second volume of the quartet, Balthazar, Darley, having shared with Balthazar his subjective account of the "girl meets boy story" he thought he had lived, now receives an "intelinear" in which Balthazar, from, presumably, a more objective position, provides an entirely different perspective on what Darley believed had been the facts. Mountolive, the protagonist of the volume bearing his name—the most conventionally written of the four volumes—gives what might be understood as the "official" version: he is, after all, the straitlaced British ambassador to Egypt. Finally, Clea, rather than occupying the same stretch of time as the first three novels (Mountolive starts earlier, but catches up) moves ahead. Darley and the woman he now loves, Clea, we are lead to believe, have matured, and can look back at the past with clearer eyes. (Significantly, in Clea, after spending some time on a remote island thinking about the past and reading Balthazar's comments, Darley discovers that he no longer needs the spectacles he as always worn. He discards them.)

Thus as one reads, one continually revises one's understanding of what has happened, and these revisions, shedding more light as one passes through them, are satisfying, but the novel is more than just a puzzle leading to a simple solution. It is as much about the city in which these stories take place as the stories themselves, and Durrell's account of various facets of the place: festivals, a duck shoot, Alexandrian café life, the streets, lanes, and alleys of the old town, are always riveting. One suspects that many of his descriptions only bear a tenuous connection to the realities of Alexandrian life; they are no less lovely for that. Part of this is thanks to Durrell's exquisite use of language. Not everyone, Durrell understood, needs to mimic Hemingway. Durrell was a poet as well as a novelist, and makes no attempt to hide it.

I read the quartet a couple of times in my early twenties and loved it. Coming back to them now, I find that I still do. Oddly, as much as I love these books, I have had a hard time with Durrell's other novel sequence, The Avignon Quintet. Maybe I'll give them another go.