Balthazar—Lawrence Durrell

A congress of eels

The novel Balthazar, the second volume of the Alexandria Quartet, came out in 1958, only one year after Justine. In Justine the narrator, who had sequestered himself in a sparsely populated island with Melissa’s young child, began by declaring his goal of setting down on paper a record of the brief time he had spent in Alexandria with some memorable characters. Now, at the beginning of Balthazar, our narrator again writes from his secluded island. He has sent the manuscript to Balthazar, who had been a central figure in Justine, to solicit his comments. Six months passes before Balthazar arrives in person and returns the manuscript, with copious notes. So this volume, while written and narrated after the first, fills in gaps, offers new interpretations, and gives more background for the events of the first volume. The narrator calls Balthazar, the book, an “interlinear” volume, rather than a sequel. He constructs it by composing new scenes inspired and informed by Balthazar’s notes. Durrell himself referred to it as a sibling of Justine, not a sequel.

In this novel, we finally learn the narrator’s name: Darley, albeit not until page 206. The first book had introduced three writers: The narrator, Darley, plus Pursewarden and Arnauti. Darley has a certain amount of professional envy of Pursewarden’s publishing success. Arnauti, Justine’s first husband, wrote a thinly veiled, fictionalized account of Justine that Darley often turned to for psychological insights about her. Justine had a child by Arnauti, but she had mysteriously disappeared one day. We learn in the second volume that Justine only agreed to marry Nessim because she thinks he can find her missing daughter or at least discover what happened to her. The effort to locate Justine’s child motivates a lot of the plot in this volume.

Balthazar’s notes do more than fill in some gaps. They force us to rethink most of what we thought we knew in the first book. One bit of information disorients us and Darley the most: Balthazar coldly explains that Darley deluded himself in believing Justine loved him. According to Balthazar,

She ‘loved,’ if anyone, Pursewarden. ‘What does that mean’? She was forced to use you as a decoy in order to protect him from the jealousy of Nessim whom she had married. Pursewarden himself did not care for her at all—supreme logic of love!”

Whoa. That changes everything.

Justine reads a lot like a film noir, complete with dangerous rich husband and seductive femme fatale. But although it has a noir mood to it, I thought when I read it the similarity ended there. True, the ill-fated duck hunt ended in a suspicious death, but apparently not the greed-motivated murder of a typical noir film for which the protagonist would eventually take the fall. Justine and Darley looked to me like straightforwardly passionate lovers who escaped detection and then parted as friends. But in Balthazar, we begin to see Darley as an unwitting and gullible accomplice in a convoluted plot. But, we must wonder, How convoluted? How deep does it go? Well, consider the duck hunt, for example. In Justine, Darley reported the victim as a creepy man who had raped Justine when she was a child. I thought at the time that Nessim had gallantly taken justice into his own hands and avenged his wife. But in the aftermath of the duck hunt, while removing the corpse, witnesses had noticed a set of dentures fall out of the dead man’s mouth. I thought nothing of that detail at the time. In Balthazar, however, we learn that the creep did not wear dentures. Then who actually died? What really happened? We don’t know.

Upon reading Balthazar’s notes, Darley summarizes for us exactly how we should view what follows.

The politics of love, the intrigues of desire, good and evil, virtue and caprice, love and murder, moved obscurely in the dark corners of Alexandria’s streets and squares, brothels and drawing rooms—moved like a great congress of eels in the slime of plot and counterplot.

While the two books supposedly deal with many of the same people in the same place at the same time, they do not repeat any scene. We get totally different stories that took place just around the corner one might say. For example, Nessim’s younger brother, Narouz, never appears in Justine, but plays a crucial role in Balthazar, as he searches for news of Justine’s child. For another example, the plot of Justine reached its climax in a duck hunt. But in this book the plot reaches its climax during a chaotic three days of carnival, only mentioned briefly in Justine. In short, Balthazar consists mostly of stories our narrator did not know about when he wrote Justine, but which change our understanding of what went before.

Both volumes explore the theme of dealing with one person through another. Characters speak to one person in order to say something to another. They kiss one person to kiss another. They kill one person to kill another. In fact, Balthazar uses Darley’s perspective to present his own. You might call Balthazar’s perspective that of a gnostic. In Justine, where we got to know Balthazar as one character among others, he led a study group exploring supposed mysteries hidden in the Kabbala, and deciphering various secret writings. It seems only appropriate that now, under Balthazar’s influence, the simple story of Justine would expose mysteries within mysteries.

At the end of Justine, I felt a sense of closure, as though nothing else needed saying. But upon finishing Balthazar, I not only doubted much of what I thought went on in the first book, but I also have doubts about everything newly introduced. Balthazar left me with more questions than answers, but also with uncertainty about what to believe in this or the next two books. In the last few pages, Clea confirms my worries by saying in a letter to Darley, “There is nothing I can do to help you now—I mean help your book. You will either have to ignore the data which Balthazar has so wickedly supplied, or ‘rework reality’ as you put it.”

The mystery of Justine’s daughter doesn’t get satisfactorily resolved in this novel. We hear that she drowned while playing alone outside. But how do we hear this? Narouz catches up with a suspect and forces him to say what he knows. Instead of saying anything himself, he makes Narouz stare into the ground until he has a vision, and in the vision, Narouz sees the child drown. By the time this happens, I don’t see this vision as any more or less reliable than anything else. It reminded me of the effect Kurosawa achieved in his movie Rashōmon (1950) by having a dead man testify at his killer’s trial through a medium. Sure. A clairvoyant vision of the past? Why not?

This volume contains so many loose threads I have to wonder about things left unsaid, too, even those things I would normally let slide. Melissa’s child, for instance, whose presence on Darley’s island retreat deserves mention in both novels, still has no name or sex. Why does Darley conceal these facts from the reader? Does some mystery revolve around this child, too?

The eponymous character of the next novel, Mountolive, makes his appearance briefly in Balthazar as someone connected with Nessim’s family in some unspecified way. Nessim’s mother loved him while her husband lay in bed, dying. But beyond that, we know little about him. The tension Durrell creates by sowing so much doubt compels me to keep going. So next week I’ll read Mountolive. A word of warning in advance, though: I plan to travel for the next three weeks, so I can’t guarantee the regularity or length of these posts.

Amazon links to works mentioned in this post.

Justine, by Lawrence Durrell (Volume 1 of the Alexandria Quartet)

Balthazar, by Lawrence Durrell (Volume 2 of the Alexandria Quartet)

Mountolive, by Lawrence Durrell (Volume 3 of the Alexandria Quartet)

The Alexandria Quartet, by Lawrence Durrell (all four volumes in one book)

Rashōmon, directed by Akira Kurosawa

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