12-30-2025, 12:40 PM
Consisting of Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea, The Alexandria Quartet explores the sexual and political intrigues of a group of expatriates in Egypt before and after the Second World War. In Justine, L. G. Darley attempts to reconcile himself to the recent end of his affair with the dark, passionate, multi-faceted Justine Hosnani. Balthazar is named for Darley's friend, a doctor and mystic, and it provides a retelling of Darley's romance with Justine from a more philosophical perspective. Mountolive is the narrative of English ambassador David Mountolive. The final volume, Clea, finds Darley maturing into the knowledge that the gifted painter Clea Montis is the woman for whom he is truly destined.
Lawrence George Durrell CBE (27 February 1912 – 7 November 1990) was an expatriate British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer. He was the eldest brother of naturalist and writer Gerald Durrell.
The Alexandria Quartet certainly is full of intrigue, political and personal intrigue as well as authorial artifice. The first three books tell essentially the same story, from different perspectives, beginning with that of an apparently simple English teacher working in Alexandria and fascinated by the beautiful Justine. She is Jewish, maried to the Coptic Christian Nessim, and the guiding spirit of this first book is one of complex sexuality. Couples fall in and out of love, and consummate or do not consummate their love, while paying due attention to ethnic and social differences that loom large in a layered society in which sex and love and marriage all have different parameters as to acceptability.
Alexandria itself was as much a Greek as an Egyptian town, its most famous inhabitant since Cleopatra and the Greek heretic Hypatia, torn to pieces by mad Christian monks in Charles Kingsley’s novel of that name (one of the texts I duly studied to understand the presentation of women and marriage in the Victorian novel), being the Greek lyric and homosexual poet Cavafy. The second novel in the Quartet, Balthazar, is about a wise old Greek homosexual, who adores Justine, and has to protect her from the consequences of her betrayals of her lovers.