Word: blanford
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Monsieur is no exception. The au thor of the lush and intricate Alexandria Quartet here invents a novelist named Blanford, who invents a novelist named Sutcliffe, who caricatures Blanford mercilessly as "Bloshford," a bestselling hack. The book is one of those box-within-box amusements: Sutcliffe, as a character in a novel by Blanford, cracks up in the process of writing a novel in which he misinterprets the situations of some of his friends, other Blanford characters. These convolutions lead to the expectable mild ironies of viewpoint, but the plot is too sketchily developed to constitute the novel...
This impression is supported by the equally sketchy handling of the novel's two other main scenes-each of them powerful enough to drive an 800-page novel of its own. The first is of a consuming and endearing love affair involving three Blanford characters (who are also written about disapprovingly by Sutcliffe). One of them is Bruce Drexel, an English doctor who has spent his life in the diplomatic service. The others are Piers de Nogaret, a French diplomat whose career paralleled that of Bruce, and Piers' fey sister Sylvie...
...various combinations, have been lovers. As the novel opens, Bruce, who has retired, has been summoned to the Nogaret chateau near Avignon by the news of Piers' suicide. Sylvie, who slid sweetly into madness years before, lives near by in a mental hospital. Bruce, as imagined by Blanford, is swamped by memories. The most haunting and troublesome are of the young lovers' involvement years be fore in Egypt with a Gnostic cult that views the universe as "a quiet maggotry," and believes that the sorry state of the world began when the rightful, benign lord of creation...