Mountolive—Lawrence Durrell

Now for a touch of the old cloak-and-dagger

Having grown comfortable with Darcey’s first-person narrative, I had to adjust to the less florid prose of an omniscient but limited third-person voice for this volume. The narration sticks closely with the story of David Mountolive in the first half of the book, before veering off to follow a series of political intrigues worthy of a John Le Carré spy thriller.

Mountolive, published in 1958, begins several years before the action of Justine, filling in for us the details of Mountolive’s love affair with Leila Hosnani, the mother of Nessim and Narouz. Her ailing husband, the Hosnani family patriarch, anticipating his own death, invites the young Mountolive to stay with the family for a while. Presumably he hopes for a relationship to develop between Leila and the Englishman, younger than her by perhaps fifteen years. This relationship lays the groundwork for an unknown future in which a personal contact within the British foreign service could prove useful to the Hosnanis. You see, Great Britain had just abandoned Egypt to self-governance, which in practice meant Muslim rule. The Hosnanis, a once powerful family within the Coptic minority, now chafes under this new political regime. When duty calls Mountolive away to begin his career in the British diplomatic service, he nevertheless continues an epistolary relationship with Leila and retains a strong affection for her two adult sons. This attachment to the Hosnani family creates an unsustainable tension between Mountolive’s personal life and his professional life, especially as the subversive doings of the Hosnanis become impossible to ignore.

The narrative voice in this novel, though somewhat less literary than that of Darcey in the previous books, still fails to inspire my complete trust. It slips into a storytelling tone at one point, making clear that the ordering of the scenes involves some choices. “But before we …, we must first ….” But despite these occasional lapses, the tone has all the assurance of any standard, garden variety omniscience. No identifiable character within the novel could witness all the conversations or have knowledge of the various thoughts the narrator describes.

Readers who miss an opinionated narrator should enjoy Pursewarden’s breezy thirty-page letter to Mountolive in chapter V, in which we learn many juicy bits of sometimes mean-spirited gossip. But don’t let Pursewarden’s flightiness fool you. Buried among the acerbic observations and Wildean wit one may find important clues to some of the Quartet’s heretofore unresolved mysteries. For instance, Pursewarden casually mentions someone “with ill-fitting dentures,” which either lets us know whose body got whisked away after the duck hunt from Justine or, for all we know, cleverly misdirects us once again.

The Hosnani family estate requires two managers. Nessim handles the financial side and lives mostly in the city, while Narouz runs the farm. Egyptian farm life as described by Durrell comes across as a primitive and barbaric affair. Narouz, short and powerful, with a cleft lip, shows a puzzling mixture of tenderness and viciousness. His casual cruelty to both humans and animals takes me aback each time it appears. In one scene, for example, Narouz practices with his whip by snapping bats in mid-flight, littering the ground with their little corpses. Such savagery characterizes the entire novel, not just Narouz. So in another scene, during a festival in the desert, we witness celebrants vivisecting uncomplaining camels and cooking their pieces. Durrell apparently delights in thus shocking his readers, if not with graphic and highly memorable descriptions of brutality, then with startling and exotic imagery.

As an expatriate Englishman, born in 1912, Durrell could hardly avoid orientalism, but he clearly prefers the mixed cultures of Alexandria to what he saw as the laughable, monolithic stodginess of his own. While in the first two volumes he has dazzled us with the exotic mystique of Egypt, in Mountolive he focuses on the tensions between these heterogeneous cultures as they emerge from under British and French colonial domination, blinking in the harsh, unfamiliar light of independence. The Brits had kept much of Egypt and the Middle East under their thumb, Christians, Jews, and Muslims coexisting in a somewhat stable cultural emulsion. But now that the colonial oppression has lifted, all the seething cultural and religious tensions seek a new, natural stability. Unfortunately, in Mountolive, the uneven division of political power in the new world order does not ease a transition to any sort of stability. Thus, at the heart of this novel lives a British investigation into a supposed conspiracy on the part of the Copts to run guns for a subversive Jewish faction in Palestine.

Durrell’s orientalism, though sympathetic, produces many stereotyped characters such as Memlik Pasha, the Muslim Foreign Minister. Memlik’s comical avarice has very little psychological significance in the novel, but it plays a crucial role in the plot. In order to stop or delay the arrest of the Hosnanis, Mountolive must successfully bribe the pasha. Somehow, nothing can move forward in Alexandria without Memlik’s blessing, and these blessings have their price. When the net starts to close around Nessim and his gun-running operation, Mountolive approaches Memlik Pasha with a substantial bribe. Supplicants seeking Memlik’s blessing must conceal their monetary gifts between the pages of a rare or unusual edition of the Koran and pretend to offer him the book as an addition to his vast collection. Memlik then takes the lucre-laced volume to his library and after a nerve-racking few moments returns. If he brings back the book saying he already has that edition, the bribe has failed (although the money has somehow disappeared). But if he returns empty-handed, then the bribe has worked its magic.

So far, we’ve seen Justine, a novel of dangerous, ungovernable passion, Balthazar, a novel of deception, sexual intrigue, and mystery; and Mountolive, a novel of political espionage and manipulation. Somehow, these three sibling novels must come together in Clea. But I’ve no idea what sort of novel to expect. I’ll try to tackle that next, although travels may delay me once again.

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)

Clea, by Lawrence Durrell (Volume 4 of the Alexandria Quartet)

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

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