Is the Tale / Focus the Same? Alexandria 2.0

Lawrence Durrell’s Balthazar is more interesting than Justine, the first installment in his Alexandra Quartet, but only because one has first read Justine. On the second page of this novel, Durrell states his premise for writing a sequel: “Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time – not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed.”

Strangely, Balthazar reminded me of the clever Zombie Wars, a science fiction book that looks at an apocalyptic war through the eyes of hundreds of participants, victims and observers. while the narrator goes about gleaning their memories for the facts. The array of perceptions makes the Wars ethereal yet mythic as they the dirty little secrets of those who encouraged the conflict or benefited there from are exposed. There are similar hidden agenda and motives in Durrell's characters.

By keeping the same narrator, but having him become the recipient of Balthazar’s journals detailing what conspiracies and deceits that were “actually occurring,” Durrell / Darley can revise his first take on his affairs and friendships.

Another metaphor that bubbled into my mind was a pousse café, that three to six layer cocktail of various cordials that are stacked in a small glass from most to least dense. I like this symbol for the Alexandria Quartet for a few reasons. First, its colors parallel those Durrell uses to describe sunrises and sunsets and waters in the port and marshes. Second, the layers are all unique, but of one piece and complementary, like his characters in Egypt. Finally, when consumed, a pousse café, unless most carefully tipped and sipped, all collapses into a ghastly thing, like the more current Long Island Iced Tea cocktail. Alexandrians are conspiring and edging toward upheavals.

With Balthazar, many of the previously “minor” characters now take center stage. Balthazar, Clea and Pursewarden become principal dancers as their parts in the adultery of Darley and Justine are explained. This is accordingly less a book about passion and love. My take on the central theme is how all people maintain perpetual facades and that when we interact with them, we are distracted by what is flawed in them and by our willingness, on occasion, to dismiss those disguises. It is interesting to note how many of Durrell’s characters are physically deformed: the barber’s hunchback, Nessim’s brother’s harelip and his mother’s pox scars, Da Cap’s eye patch and darting tongue. Durrell also uses Scobie’s and Posnal’s cross-dressing and a masked carnival to emphasize the intent to deceive and distract. What makes these characters colorful are these exaggerations, but vivid like a child’s one dimensional coloring book, not as a fully portrayed unforgettable literary character.

Balthazar’s journal’s perspective is intended to educate Darley and show him that those people he regarded as most perfect, especially Justine, were not as they presented themselves to him or the world. All were duped. Crimes and cabals are covered over or superficially investigated. Once again as in Justine, Durrell uses quotes from Pursewarden’s writings as a cover for his own thoughts: “If things were always what they seemed, how impoverished would be the imagination of man … There are only as many realities as you care to imagine.”

Or a more lengthy thesis for Durrell: “Where can a man who really thinks take refuge in the so-called real world without defending himself against stupidity by the constant exercise of equivocation? Tell me that. Particularly a poet … (who are) not really serious about ideas or people … they are for use. But there is no question of them being true or false, or having souls. In this way the poet preserves his freshness of vision …”

This premise is the devise that Durrell can toy with in the later volumes of the Quartet, retelling a fresh new story with revamped, maybe revisionist, material. And toying as well with his readers as they are forced to ponder how the author can both vest and strip a character with certain noble or base traits; how he can make them “false” in a book that is fiction per se.

On to Mountolive.