Volume four in the series known collectively as The Alexandria Quartet, this novel is once again related from the first-person point of view of Darley, the English writer who narrated the first and second volumes, Justine and Balthazar, respectively. The third volume, Mountolive, features a third-person narrator; its events clarify for readers some of the mysteries developed in the first two.

Darley, however, has been hiding away on a Greek island after betraying Melissa, his lover, and Nessim, his best friend, through an obsessive affair with Nessim’s wife, Justine. But he has been paid back in his own coin, since Nessim and Melissa conceived a daughter born shortly before Melissa dies, and since Nessim, Justine, and other friends of Darley—if Balthazar is to be believed—played Darley for a fool and used him as a patsy. Darley has taken Melissa’s child with him to shelter her until Nessim should summon them both back to Alexandria, and in the opening pages of Clea, that summons comes.

World War II has begun in the meantime, and Darley returns to an Alexandria under bombardment and must slip into the harbor in a risky venture. Life in the town goes on as usual in spite of the war, but Justine remains a shadow over his mind until he sees her again and discovers that he is free of his obsession for her.

Darley and Clea are slowly drawn together into a love affair that surpasses Darley’s emotional experiences with either Melissa or Justine. He begins to be healed of the pain that drove him away from Alexandria. They visit the rooms where their old friend Scobie lived—yet another ambiguous individual who may have used Darley for his own clandestine ends.

Through the mysterious workings of Alexandrian religion, a shrine has grown up around the bathtub in which Scobie had once brewed a vast quantity of booze—enough to get his entire neighborhood drunk. Darley and Clea witness a procession to the shrine, enthralled by the strange contrast between the man’s life and the misshapen memory of it that has developed because of the shrine. This discrepancy echoes a key theme for Darley, whose memory of events during his earlier stay is always at odds with the reports of others.

In a riveting climax, Darley, Clea, and Balthazar take a boat of Nessim’s to go skin-diving in the pleasant, secluded cove where a derelict boat lies on the bottom. An accident leads to a life-or-death situation that will irrevocably change the course of a life even in the event of survival. The possessive allure of Alexandria—the spell it casts over its residents and its visitors—continues to hold sway over Darley and Clea as they explore the depths of love and art and puzzle out the mysteries of the reality that lies intangibly beneath the bedazzling appearances of the world.

Bibliography
Begnal, Michael H., ed. On Miracle Ground: Essays on the Fiction of Lawrence Durrell. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1990.
Friedman, Alan Warren. Lawrence Durrell and The Alexandria Quartet: Art for Love’s Sake. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

Tags: 20th century literature, Alan Warren Friedman, Alexandria novel, Alexandrian religion, Art for Love’s Sake, Balthazar, Clea, Clea and Darley relationship, Darley narrator, Durrell character development, English writer protagonist, Justine affair, Lawrence Durrell, Lawrence Durrell criticism, literary memory theme, literary obsession, literary series analysis, love and art in fiction, Mediterranean setting, Melissa and Nessim, metafictional narrative, Michael H. Begnal, modernist fiction, Mountolive, On Miracle Ground, postwar literature, psychological fiction, Scobie shrine, The Alexandria Quartet, unreliable narrator, wartime narrative, WWII Alexandria