Customer Reviews

Avignon Quintet

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I hold The Alexandria Quartet to be perhaps the greatest novel in English literature. The less well known Avignon Quintet, I guessed, was never likely quite to measure up; unfortunately this expectation proved right.

Of course the Quintet is, in many parts, a beautiful book, or collection of books. Durrell takes the reader to Egypt again, and his depiction of the south of France, where he lived, makes for a vivid and appealing painting of a country: Provence, that has now changed beyond recognition. His speculations on the gnostics and the cat-and-mouse game around the templars' mystery are interesting and had the potential to guide the kind of multi-layered story developed in `Alexandria'.

But the five-tome piece has none of the sober coherence of Durrell's earlier work. The novellas, and too often the characters, are related by a writer's trick, not through the plot itself. They are also marred, in `Livia', by an attempt at a historical rendering that falls flat by purposely ignoring chronology. And Durrell rambles; of course he is witty and brilliant, but no one can always be brilliant over asides that take perhaps half of this 1,300 page block.

The Quintet remains readable and in many parts absorbing, but it is for true devotees of the author. I wonder if Durrell was tainted by the French `nouvelle vague', which seems to have influenced the book's construction and characterisation, or whether he was simply aiming too high in trying to exceed his own, unmatchable masterpiece.

I came upon Lawrence Durrell through his first best-selling book Justine, which was the first of the Alexandria Quartet series. The Quartet was Durrell's high water mark, in which his strengths outweighed his weaknesses. If you enjoy poetic prose, the rise and fall of sound, and a craftsmanship of language which appears too infrequently in this world, you'll enjoy Durrell's Quartet and, to a lesser degree, the Quintet. The Quartet was conceived as a whole, a literary equivalent to Einstein's influential special theory of relativity. There were three physical dimensions, or rather perspectives, and there was one dimension of time. Although Durrell's ability to delineate characters was less impressive than his ability to craft beautiful sentences, there was enough in the Quartet to stick in the memory and the disreputable Scobie is one of the twentieth-century's great minor characters.

Unfortunately, the Quintet is a lesser work. The first novel, in fact, was obviously conceived as a stand-alone self-contained work. Only after it had been successfull did Durrell decide to expand the canvas and this expansion is necessarily less organic because it was not planned from the outset. Thus the Quintet lacks an underlying coherence even as the author works hard to try to add one on from the outside, as it were. But it's worth reading for the skill Durrell evinced with the English language, and for his observations on how life alters character and is in turn altered by character. His account of war-time France is compelling, for example.

Ultimately, Durrell was too constrained by the dead weight of theory he absorbed as a young man. Freud's jejune notions of human sexuality, for example, totally distort the characterization of Livia, just as they warped the characterization of so many characters in the Quartet. One can't help feeling that true artists depict life as they see it, while would-be-great artists rely too much on the "insights" of others. Durrell, in his reliance on sterile psychological theories, unfortunately falls into the latter camp and this makes his works ultimately unsatisfying, not least because it limits the first-person narrative device by constraining what is understood.

The greatest disappointment comes with the end. Durrell was caught up in the French enthusiasm for post-structuralism (he lived in Sommieres near Nimes for the last 13-odd years of his life) and this led him to be "creative" with the ending of his final book of the Quintet - an ending that is, in retrospect, neither brave nor expansive, but merely an evasion that leaves the reader feeling seriously let down. Story-tellers should not abandon the story because of some transiently fashionable literary theory.

This review has enumerated the various flaws of the Quintet, but I want to end by talking about its strengths. Durrell is a master wordsmith and anyone who enjoys mellifluous English should buy and cherish these novels. His creation of an authorial alter-ego (the narrator Blanford has an ongoing conflict with his own creation Sutcliff, who "escapes" from the confines of Blanford's imagination and goes off to live, more or less, his own life) is very funny and fortunately doesn't rely too much on the deconstructivist theory that inspired the trope. His depiction of women is more sure and more compassionate than in the Quartet - indeed, Constance is almost (but not quite) too sympathetic a character. And finally, the reason the reader is left so deeply disappointed with the ending of the final book is simply because Durrell succeeds in drawing us in to his creation to the degree that we really want to know what happens next - which is the mark of a compelling story-teller.