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Spectator, The, Aug 7, 1999 by Levi, Peter

Thirty years ago, I remember being puzzled and excited by The Alexandria Quartet, but that was because I knew Lawrence Durrell and had admired him since the war as a poet. I still do admire him greatly as a poet, but already before any of these four novels appeared he was being written about by Bernard Bergonzi as a poet who needed to be revived, and that is always a death knell to any poet who is still alive. The Alexandria Quartet was a monument and it appeared within a few years of Durrell's first Collected Poems. He went on to publish a second, enlarged Collected Poems and verses that were few in number but among them were some of his best.

As George Seferis once said after seeing Durrell, `The trouble with Larry is he is really too clever.' Admittedly, he did not shout as loud as Katsimbalis, he was not as charming as Bernard Spencer, who fell out of a train, and he was not as intelligent or as good a poet as George Seferis. T. S. Eliot never read The Alexandria Quartet, though of course he knew Durrell and his poetry. Helen Gardiner told me she heard from Eliot that he had decided he must read the Quartet for his Lenten penance but she absolved him from the awful task. Recently Durrell's grave has been disturbed by biographers and by a film: these offerings are more ghastly than he deserved, but the waves have flowed over them and Gerald, who has died since, is at the moment the more famous.

The Quartet is read by Stephen Thorne, who was the voice of Asian, C. S. Lewis's lion who lived in a cupboard. The trouble with his reading is that he has evidently no knowledge of Greek or Arabic or the Arabic variety of French, and as many pages are supposed to be in these languages and their accents should vary through a wide spectrum, it is really no good for him to present in every case the voice of Aslan. The characters sound like a collection of my aunts and cousins from St John's Wood in 1938. There is not enough variation and indeed the only successful character study is that of a minor civilian British official whose false teeth do not fit. The thought that Scobie, or El Scobe, is supposed to be funny is horrific, but that brings us to the trouble with the Quartet.

In the first place, these tapes lack the appendices of the books. I long ago threw away my copies of this work but I remember in the appendices some of the best translations of Cavafy I have ever encountered, and a long rigmarole about the futuristic pretensions of the novels which did add to the amusement value. The truth is that Durrell wrote these books simply for money; they were fed by commercial success, and they took very little time to write, the first perhaps ten days and the second a fortnight - at least that was my impression at a time when I was more interested in the subject. Mountolive is the only one which has any kind of plot: luckily for me it was the first I read, but it is defective in many ways.

The trouble with them all is that Durrell knew nothing about Alexandria, or indeed Egypt, and incurred a very severe review in the Semaine Egyptienne which crumbles somewhere among my papers. His David Mountolive is like a dead fish and certainly not a patch on Sir Miles Lampson, the real ambassador. Even Anthony Eden had wilder and weirder views than anything Durrell dares attribute to Mountolive. His embassy is a mere blank.

The worst travesty is the grand Coptic conspiracy in Mountolive. There was not, and never was, any conspiracy by these unhappy people. The richest Copts gave up vast possessions and co-operated fully with Nasser. There is too much known about the history of modern Egypt and of the Copts to fit here, but it is certain that the Copts and their life, the lake house in the desert and all the rest of it are pure invention. On this perhaps Durrell should be congratulated. He has invented two characters in the Coptic brothers who brilliantly suggest two sides of the Coptic minority, only it was not ever like that, not at all. One of his most comic mistakes is to have Mountolive and a girl leap from the promenade to the beach, which would have landed them impaled on the iron spikes that protected bathing huts from the birds.

Still, as a melodramatic farce it would be quite acceptable, Aslan and all, if it were not for the constant undertone of ethnic impropriety. `No one can think or feel in the dimensionless obsolescence of Arabic.' Durrell almost never mentions jazz without calling it negro, and this is a word he uses elsewhere for something nasty. He is really an old colonial sahib, born in India and writing in Cyprus. He has thought of Alexandria as a good fat subject, which it is, though it is better and more fully treated by Olivia Manning and my dear friend Yannis Tsirkas.

The disappointed reader should not venture into this grotesque fairyland. The sex is all outdated, and although once it must have seemed shocking, it is boring now. The silliest character is Pursewarden, who used to go to bed with his sister in London and can not manage sex with anybody else, poor fellow. It is all reminiscent of that verse of Dryden's in which the `lovers were all untrue'.