the alexandria quartet by lawrence durrell

Here is a part of what a character sees when he returns to Alexandria in Clea, the final volume of the quartet: ‘plum-blue Ethiopians in snowy turbans, bronze Sudanese with puffy charcoal lips, pewter-skinned Lebanese and Bedouin with the profiles of kestrels’.

To say that Durrell sees the life of ordinary Egyptians going on around him but writes about it only as scenery is true but also a disservice to the extraordinary vivacity of his descriptive prose. Therefore Alexandria became home to a medley of expatriates from the Middle East, Europe, and the Balkans. In his fascinating study of the city, Philip Mansel summarises: ‘The golden age of cosmopolitanism in Alexandria was the twenty-year period between 19.’ The Egypt that Durrell knew from personal experience was an independent country but British troops remained, protecting their country’s business concerns over the Suez canal. Durrell’s unquestioned assumption of the superiority of European culture allows him, paradoxically, to be keenly responsive to the racial and ethnic mix that constituted the multinational aspect of Alexandria during the 1930s and ’40s. It is not difficult to see the casual racism in The Alexandria Quartet, irrigated by imperialist attitudes that were common at the time, but the work deserves its acclaimed reputation as a work of fiction from the second half of the 20th century. As other characters make throwaway remarks that are equally ridiculous–’The timorous soul of the Egyptian cries always for the whip’ ‘we Europeans in such disharmony with the fearful animal health of the blacks around us’–it is probably not divorced from the author’s own prejudices. This is what someone says about Egypt in Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet. ‘An education system based on the abacus and a theology which got left behind with Augustine and Aquinas’.

The alexandria quartet by lawrence durrell