Lawrence Durrell's Mountolive

And it's on to Mountolive, the conventional one.

This, the third novel of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, came out in 1958, and was the second of the quartet to come out that year. According to Ian MacNiven's biography of Durrell, he'd been meditating the subject of the quartet for almost two decades when he began to write it in earnest. It was going to be set in Athens for a while rather than Alexandria, though that's hard to imagine--it seems so tied to its place. But when he started to write in earnest, he didn't slack off: he wrote four volumes, totalling a bit over 1100 pages in my edition, in something like two years. Zoom, zoom.

Mountolive is the conventional one in two senses: it is written in a more staid (as staid as Durrell ever gets I suspect) third person which mostly moves forward in time instead of bopping around. But also because David Mountolive, later Sir David, is a conventional man, especially by the standards of the Alexandria Quartet circle. He's a professional diplomat who eventually becomes the British ambassador to Egypt. He has his love affair, too--love is the avowed theme of the quartet--with the mother of the rich Coptic banker Nessim Hosnani, but in the end turns away from it. And, as fits a story about a diplomat, this novel reveals a political dimensions to events of the first two novels--the death of Capodistria, the flight of Justine, the death of Narouz Hosnani--that first seemed motivated by amorous passions. It adds another layer of complexity to the characters and to the story, something all to the good.

But while Durrell in his real life worked in minor diplomatic roles, he's not at heart a diplomat. He hangs out with demimonde artists and prostitutes, the lost and the damned. Staid conventionality doesn't come naturally to him. Agents and spies in minor European capitols or colonial outposts suggest Eric Ambler or Alan Furst and Durrell just doesn't do it as well. There were moments in this one when I wasn't really convinced.

Of Sir David:

He could not even feel happy without feeling guilty.

Now Durrell was not a stupid man, and to simplify is to falsify, but that's the problem as he sees it in a nutshell: one should be in love, be honest about sex, and be happy without letting guilt get in the way. But I think Brave New World is more like the world today: we feel guilty when we're unhappy, not when we're happy. Here: why don't you just have some soma?

Ah, well, I wasn't reading it for the philosophy, but for the talk and the scenery and the prose.

I've finished Clea, with more thoughts to go. I need to get posting!

E. C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case

"I suppose everybody has at least heard of Trent's Last Case."

Dorothy Sayers wrote that in an undated talk she was going to give on radio but didn't. It may once have been true, but I doubt it is anymore, even among serious readers of mysteries. Trent's Last Case by E. C. Bentley came out in 1913, it was the first Trent case Bentley wrote, and Bentley wrote only two more. There aren't a lot of them and it's a long time ago. Its fame has long since yielded to obscurity.

Which is kind of a pity.

Part of its importance is just because it came early, it's true. Trent, a painter and a newspaper reporter, is supposed to be a genius detective and we're told of other difficult cases he solved for which he revealed his solution in the Record, a London newspaper. He may be a genius detective, but in this one he's wrong not once, but twice, a trick picked up by Ellery Queen on more than one occasion. And Trent falls in love with a suspect, which definitely was an influence on Dorothy Sayers herself, cf. Strong Poison, and it was a motif that went on to have a long history, going from the innocent and hardly suspected Mrs. Manderson in this one to the accused Harriet Vane in Strong Poison, to Sam Spade's actually guilty of something love Brigid O'Shaughnessy in Maltese Falcon, to the even guiltier love object of Kinsey Millhone in Sue Grafton's 'A' Is For Alibi.

The setup is this:  the first chapter tells us Sigsbee Manderson is a big man in finance; the second that he's dead, shot through the eye. Who did it? He was estranged from his wife and he was ferociously jealous of John Marlowe his personal secretary. He'd also created enemies among the American labor movement; they had a long reach; was it some American anarchist who killed him? This came out a year before Arthur Conan Doyle's Valley of Fear, another novel where the long arm of American labor was featured, and I wondered if it was an influence there as well, though it may be that Pinkerton's and Haymarket rioters were simply in the air.

Or was it somebody else entirely? I suspect you know the answer to that question, even if you haven't read it.

Anyway, it was pretty good, I thought. A little overwritten at the start, but then it settled down. There was some rom, but it was a little lacking in com, which is a pity and a surprise since the C in E. C. Bentley stands for Clerihew, also the name of a comic verse form he invented:

George The Third
Ought never to have occurred.
One can only wonder
At so grotesque a blunder.

Vintage Mystery Challenge. Gold.  Why. Best Of List.

Lawrence Durrell's Balthazar

"I love the French edition with its uncut pages. I would not want a reader too lazy to use a knife on me."

A bit of bravado on Lawrence Durrell's part? It's ostensibly an obiter dicta of Pursewarden, but Pursewarden is one of two novelist characters in the series, both of whom are, in different ways, stand-ins for Durrell.

In any case, I'm not inclined to take up the challenge; I like the series and it's more commented upon (both good and bad) than read I'm sure; and no doubt more neglected than either of those choices. So, no knife.

Balthazar (1958) is the second of the novels of the Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet and it operates as a corrective to the first; without the corrective it would be all too easy to take Justine as just the romantic blatherskite of some not very successful decadent writer. It's not, but it does impersonate such a thing pretty well.

Darley, the other novelist character in the series, with the same initials as Lawrence G. Durrell, has written a first volume Justine and sent it off to friends for comment. Mostly they neglect it, but one, Balthazar, a homosexual Greek doctor of their circle in Alexandria, drops in on him with the text marked up as the "Great Interlinear," and Darley learns a lot of what he wrote in the first volume was untrue. So he writes a new book covering the same period of time with this new information.

The most important corrective is that Darley, who was in love with Justine in the first volume, assumed Justine was in turn in love with him. But Balthazar says she loved Pursewarden and Darley himself was just a decoy or a substitute. He needs to rethink everything that happened.

Durrell writes in a brief headnote:

The characters and situations in this novel, the second of a group--a sibling, not a sequel to Justine--are entirely imaginary, as is the personality of the narrator. Nor could the city be less unreal. 

Modern literature offers us no Unities, so I have turned to science and am trying to complete a four-decker novel whose form is based on the relativity proposition. 

Three sides of space and one of time constitute the soup-mix of a continuum. The four novels follow this pattern. 

The three first parts, however, are to be deployed spatially (hence the use of "sibling" not "sequel") and are not linked in a serial form. They interlap, interweave, in a purely spatial relation. Time is stayed. The fourth part alone will represent time and be a true sequel.

That makes it sound more precious than it is; perhaps the use of 'soup-mix' will give us the right sense of Durrell's attitude to his plan. In any case there's a quote (Auden, I think?) about an author's theory of his own work: that it is merely so much scaffolding towards the construction, and it should be kicked away at the end to allow the building to be appreciated on its own.

The Other Reader asked if this going-over made it dull and my answer was no. (I am unable to say how anyone might react to Durrell's hothouse prose style, though; it is an exotic taste.) Durrell likes big events; the first novel ends with a hunt scene in which Darley is worried an accident is being arranged for him--Justine's husband suspects. And in fact another character is killed (or murdered or something) during the hunt. Balthazar also ends with a grand set piece, at Carnival, and again one of the characters is murdered, with a subsequent investigation. Though the two novels cover the same period of time there is more than enough difference in the events to keep it interesting; Durrell manages his structure quite well. The third, Mountolive, begins a little before the events of the first two but then covers the same time period; it, too, has a big set piece and it, too, gives a number of picturesque travel details about Alexandria and Egypt. So, yes, it's a pretty good read.

Another of Pursewarden's so-called Obiter Dicta:

"I have always believed in letting my reader sink or skim."

Go ahead and read it fast, perhaps, but there's no need to skim.