Word: pursewarden
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...projected quartet of novels, Author Durrell continues the febrile investigation of life and love in prewar Egypt so splendidly begun in Justine (TIME, Aug. 26, 1957) and Balthazar (TIME, Aug. 25, 1958). Most of the same characters are still loping through the bedrooms and back alleys of Alexandria: Pursewarden, the slightly mad novelist-diplomat; Justine, the dark-browed, amoral Jewess; Nessim, her millionaire Coptic Christian husband; Darley, the sad-sack Irish schoolteacher; Melissa, the tuberculous Greek dancer. But the protagonist of this new book is a relative newcomer, David Mountolive, who returns to Egypt as British ambassador after having lived...
With the appearance of Mountolive, sex and sadness recede before the powerful thrust of politics. Many of the riddles posed in the earlier books get new answers. Pursewarden kills himself not from spiritual torpor but in expiation of a political blunder. Justine's fevered racing from bed to bed is shown to be patriotism, not nymphomania, for she and Nessim are smuggling arms into Palestine. Nessim believes that only the creation of a strong Jewish state will save the isolated minorities of the Middle East-Copts, Greeks, Armenians, Jews-from "being gradually engulfed by the Arab tide...
...this is the weakest of the three novels, both because Mountolive himself is basically an uninteresting man and because the introduction of politics as the theme makes puppets of Justine, Nessim and Pursewarden. As in all political life, there is the effect of contrivance rather than spontaneity, of truckling to slogans rather than living by inner compulsions...
...assortment of other exotics, who seem to have crawled from beneath a blistered and immemorial stone of Alexandria-Scobie, the transvestite policeman; Toto de Brunei, who dies with a hatpin rammed through his brain; Capodistria, the goatish sybarite; hare-lipped Narouz, who carries a severed head in his saddlebag; Pursewarden, who has discovered "the uselessness of having opinions" and turns to the humdrum world "the sort of smile which might have hardened on the face of a dead baby...
...Pursewarden, who might thereby escape Nessim's slow-burning revenge. Darley would willingly have died at Justine's command, but Pursewarden, her real love, considers Justine merely "a tiresome old sexual turnstile through which presumably we must all pass...