Books: Bedrooms & Back Alleys

MOUNTOLIVE (318 pp.)—Lawrence Durrell—Duffon ($3.95).

In this, the third of a projected quartet of novels, Author Durrell continues the febrile investigation of life and love in prewar Egypt so splendidly begun in Justine (TIME, Aug. 26, 1957) and Balthazar (TIME, Aug. 25, 1958). Most of the same characters are still loping through the bedrooms and back alleys of Alexandria: Pursewarden, the slightly mad novelist-diplomat; Justine, the dark-browed, amoral Jewess; Nessim, her millionaire Coptic Christian husband; Darley, the sad-sack Irish schoolteacher; Melissa, the tuberculous Greek dancer. But the protagonist of this new book is a relative newcomer, David Mountolive, who returns to Egypt as British ambassador after having lived there in his youth.

With the appearance of Mountolive, sex and sadness recede before the powerful thrust of politics. Many of the riddles posed in the earlier books get new answers. Pursewarden kills himself not from spiritual torpor but in expiation of a political blunder. Justine’s fevered racing from bed to bed is shown to be patriotism, not nymphomania, for she and Nessim are smuggling arms into Palestine. Nessim believes that only the creation of a strong Jewish state will save the isolated minorities of the Middle East—Copts, Greeks, Armenians, Jews—from “being gradually engulfed by the Arab tide.”

Like the other books of Durrell’s Alexandrian cycle, Mountolive has vivid imagery (the impact of the desert night is like “the flutter of eyelashes against the mind”) and penetrant thought (no such thing as art exists for artists and the public; “it only exists for critics and those who live in the forebrain”). The book also has scenes of ghastly hilarity, as when Mountolive stumbles inadvertently into a brothel of child prostitutes and nearly loses his reason as well as his wallet.

Yet this is the weakest of the three novels, both because Mountolive himself is basically an uninteresting man and because the introduction of politics as the theme makes puppets of Justine, Nessim and Pursewarden. As in all political life, there is the effect of contrivance rather than spontaneity, of truckling to slogans rather than living by inner compulsions.

But Author Durrell’s weaknesses would still be strengths in most other novelists, and readers of Mountolive will be sharply aware that they are encountering an acute intelligence pursuing a grand design. The book ends with a rise of tension as Nessim’s brother, a naive savage armed with a bullwhip and a Messianic impulse, is brutally slain. Faithful to his belief that “truth is what most contradicts itself,” Author Durrell fails to be explicit about the murderer. It may be Nessim, Justine, or even agents of King Farouk’s lethargic government. Presumably, this cliffhanger conclusion will be solved in Clea, the last volume of the quartet, scheduled for publication next year.