We were latecomers to the place, modern scavengers of history upon a scene which had, it seems, long since exhausted all its historical potentialities.

So, there's this author, right? And he's writing a work about characters based on acquaintances of his, but one of the characters is writing his own work, and hates the author, and some of the other characters are writing their own diaries, in which they sometimes doubt the authenticity of each other's works.

Or maybe all of that is a lie.

The question of who, and what, is real seems likely to occupy the future novels in Durrell's "quincunx", but in Monsieur, the first of the five, there are bigger issues at stake. A man is dead, his sister has gone mad, and they're all wondering about their gradual awakening to the possibilities of Gnostic mysticism and whether there's a Prince of Darkness rising to usurp the dying/dead God.

It's all a bit heavy.

I adore Durrell's Alexandria Quartet utterly and completely, and I think, in Monsieur (written more than a decade later when the author was at the end of middle-age), he intensifies what made the earlier work great, but also his flaws are writ large.

The good: Durrell's incisive character work is on display, with flurries of imaginative writing, particularly in the scenes at the Macabru oasis. And his descriptive powers are on point! From an astonishing vision of a crumbling chateau at Christmas to the Nile in all its glory. The poet side of Durrell can expound for pages at a time, capturing the most minute moments and transforming them into sublime highlights.

On the other side of the coin, Durrell is undoubtedly a problematic writer for those of us young people in the 21st century. His white men are all hopeless drunks with university degrees and penchants for uttering half a paragraph in French or Latin (with no helpful footnote to translate); his Jews are always troubled by their feelings of dissatisfaction with their race; his women eternally prone to madness and simplicity; and his Arabs fascinating and enigmatic but also always slightly pitiable. And the less said about the novel's only black character, a jazz-playing, adulteress named Trash who has a seeming inability to grasp the beauty of Western art, the better. I don't think this inherently ruins the book. Durrell, after all, was hardly a stern, racist Britisher. He spent the vast majority of his life outside of England and essentially renounced it altogether. He was fascinated by the people and cultures of the Middle East and North Africa, and by the Jews, as evidenced by his choices of locations, wives, mistresses, etc, throughout his life. Like a lot of educated Sahibs of his era, Durrell wasn't a racist, but he saw the world in a manner perhaps best described as culturalist. People are products of their culture, and people do fall into a lot of broad generalisations - so goes the theory - and the fact that his most penetrating characters are often educated English men is because those are the people he could best understand. The novel's many distressing statements certainly will prevent Durrell from becoming popular any time soon, and I don't think we should ignore his problematic status as a writer. But we also must remember that at no point in this book is Lawrence Durrell the narrator. The book is set thirty years before it was written, and each chapter has a narrative voice. It's complex. Not so complex as to deny there are significant problems, but also not as easy as some readers would like to make it out to be*.

*(All this is written from the standpoint of an educated white male, albeit a gay one, so I'm not claiming in any way to speak objectively about the situation!)

The first half of the book is certainly stronger. The second half collapses a little under the weight of its collective conceits. The 'scraps' and 'vignettes' idea worked better in Alexandria, where Pursewarden (who receives a delightful and meta-textual name check here!) had a true pizzazz about him, the most bitter Thersites the writing world has ever known. Here, a lot of the second half is borderline incomprehensible, although part of it is to do with the fact that Durrell is old enough to be my great-grandfather, and was born in a different country in a different time. The meanings his clique could extract from an ambiguous line would be far different than the equivalent for mine. Being fairly well read, I was faring better than most, delighting in the subtle references to Proust and Shakespeare, for example, but I think Avignon is even less likely to gain a new generation of fervent acolytes than Alexandria is. Nevertheless, the beauty and density here is incredible, even if I have little time for the more hokier superstitious elements that have little merit in the 21st century. I shall carry out to the rest of the Quintet, intrigued to see whether this Angkor Wat of a work becomes more viable with each addition to the structure, or more labyrinthine!

I stored up simply a constellation of moments, a firework display of small but brilliant incidents which were like a set of coloured engravings of this great river with its moods and silences, its strange caprices and impulses. ( )

I recall being disappointed compared to the Alexandria Quartet, but holding it to such high standards is a mistake. Enjoy for itself and its flights of prose, revelling in purple:
THE SOUTHBOUND TRAIN FROhM PARIS WAS THE ONE WE had always taken from time immemorial –the same long slowcoach of a train, stringing out its bluish lights across the twilight landscapes like some super-glow-worm. It reached Provence at dawn, often by a brindled moonlight which striped the countryside like a tiger’s hide. How well I remembered, how well he remembered! The Bruce that I was, and the Bruce I become as I jot down these words, a few every day. A train subject to unexpected halts, unexplained delays; it could fall asleep anywhere, even in open country, and remain there, lost in thought, for hours. Like the swirls and eddies of memory itself –thoughts eddying about the word “suicide”, for example, like frightened tadpoles. It has never been, will never be, on time, our train. ( )

I just wanted to read another Alexandria Quartet. Not nearly as good, but similar enough that I finished it. ( )

Struggled to get through this - too abstract for me, the last quarter of the book in particular was tough going (Wikipedia reveals this to be the 'highly fragmentary' unrevised notes that preceded the novel...)

I'm afraid I'll be giving the rest of the quintet a miss. ( )

Overwritten, but I have a soft-spot for Durrell. ( )