BALTHAZAR [Paperback]

"Balthazar" is the second of the sibling tomes of Lawrence Durrell's "Alexandria Quartet". The novel allows the reader to dive again deep into Alexandrian life and see everything what happens already in "Justine" from a different angle.

Darley, the narrator, still living in seclusion on the remote Greek Island, has sent the story (i.e. Justine) to one of the Alexandrian friends, Balthazar, the Jewish, gay doctor interested in philosophy and theology, initiator of the Kabbalah group, suspected of spying activity. Balthazar during his short visit on the island gives Darley the manuscript back together with a substantial amount of notes, which (with Darley's comments) are reconstituted in this volume. Darley was prompted to add a lot of the notes, as, reflecting upon them, he realized that despite his doubts, expressed in "Justine", many things he took for granted are completely different than he thought.

Balthazar sees the events described in "Justine" from his own point of view, and, having often more information or just different sources than Darley, his versions of events add to or change the descriptions from the first volume. New characters are introduced, and those, who were merely mentioned or hinted upon (Pursewarden, Mountolive, Leila, Narouz), become central, and their preoccupations and emotions are at the first plane. These shifts, instead of clarifying things that were blurred and mysterious in "Justine" make the narrative even more slippery and allusive. New avenues open for each event, tales within tales are discovered, which need their own explanation, and the atmosphere is even more dreamy... The motivations of ome characters, especially Nessim, seem to change completely from what Darley perceived, as new events are revealed. The search for the truth obviously cannot end here, so the reader needs to proceed to "Mountolive".

Alexandria becomes even more of a main character in this novel, and definitely the one with the strongest and versatile personality. Most of the other characters, struck by destructive love (again the analysis of love is one of the main themes, although the secret service intrigue gets more momentum), are impressionable, prone to spontaneous, sudden behaviors, and transient. The climactic event, as the hunting party was in Justine, is this time the carnival ball, where the reader roams the streets together with the characters in disguise... and is a witness to another death.

"Balthazar" is even more full of aphorisms than "Justine" - there seems to be a sentence for any occasion, and whereas the generalizations of love may appear trivial, childish even, the truths about literature and theoretical background of Durrell's enterprise to create a novel which would reflect its times, are amazingly formulated and put into the mouth of the surprising number of the writer characters (look especially for what Pursewarden has to say).

In summary, this is another delightful volume, different than "Justine" and only giving the reader the appetite for more of Durrell's Alexandria!

As I read the second of Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, I first looked for another focus. (I had been so impressed with the watercolor decriptions of the first.) In the beginning of the novel, I thought Durrell had decided to be more desciptive in the area of sounds and thought he had impishly personified this goal with a focus on a strange talking parrot.

However, I was soon drawn into the story. I forget my efforts at intellectualizing and found that the characters had broadened for me. I wanted to read about what was happening to them and what had happened to them. I found myself changed from a distant observer into one who empathized with the characters. I noticed that I had been jealous of Justine in the first novel and found myself happy that she was no longer worshipped in the second novel.

Durrell's desciptions went past lush and ripe into fascinating, fermenting, and magnetic. Intrigue is introduced. Other sides of incidents are shown. I loved this book and intend to read the other two in the series.

Sometimes I get the impression that Durrell had a life time stash of pithy quotes he just had to get worked in somewhere. In this book he has an addendum titled "Consequential Data." Don't miss these. For example, "Gamblers and lovers always play to lose."

BALTHAZAR, the second novel in Lawrence Durrell's ALEXANDRIA QUARTET, is a less daunting proposition than its predecessor, JUSTINE. The author points out that the first three novels (these two plus MOUNTOLIVE) all overlap in time, looking at the same events from different perspectives; only the fourth book, CLEA, is a true sequel. Nonetheless, it is essential to read JUSTINE first; the greater clarity and expansiveness of BALTHAZAR is possible only because the reader already knows most of the characters and events; there is not enough explanation for the story to stand on its own.

The set-up is simple. The narrator (who now has a name, Darley) receives a surprise visitor to his Greek island, Balthazar, the doctor who had played a secondary role in the earlier novel. He bears with him the manuscript of JUSTINE, which Darley had sent him for comment, and has just time to return it together with his own interleaved notes and marginalia, before his ship leaves again. So Darley/Durrell is left with this huge volume of new material, which he calls "the great Interlinear" as though it were a sacred text. He realizes that several of his assumptions in the original story were mistaken, and so is forced to tell it again, sometimes quoting Balthazar directly, sometimes reimagining it in his own voice.

The book is clearer than JUSTINE in several respects, as though emerging from smoke into light. Durrell seems to use fewer unexplained foreign words, though he still breaks into French at the drop of a hat. The chapters are shorter and more clearly marked. The narrative dwells longer on a few connected characters, or a linear sequence of events. While the climactic duck shoot was the only action set-piece in the earlier book, there are many here: Nessim's ride into the desert with his brother Narouz, the street festival of Sitna Mariam, the Venetian-style masked carnival, and several others. The effective addition of a second narrator (Balthazar) means that not everything is filtered through Darley's sensibility, so other characters develop greater individuality through the cross-lighting. I am not sure that they all become more likeable -- in particular, there is one scene with Clea near the end which strains my previous view of her as a hovering angel -- but it is easier to understand them. There is also more use of direct speech, so that the two older British characters, the writer Pursewarden and Scobie the old sailor, develop distinct (and rather funny) voices.

Add there is still the rich color and cadence of Durrell's descriptive language, a little overdone perhaps, but full of surprising word-choices and sharp observations, especially when capturing sounds: "From the throat of a narrow alley, spilled like a widening circle of fire upon the darkness, burst a long tilting gallery of human beings headed by the leaping acrobats and dwards of Alexandria, and followed at a dancing measure by the long grotesque cavalcade of gonfalons, rising and falling in a tide of mystical light, treading the peristaltic measure of the wild music -- nibbled out everywhere by the tattling flutes and the pang of drums or the long shivering orgasm of tembourines struck by the dervishes in their habits as they moved towards the site of the festival." No longer does this writing overwhelm the narrative it contains, nor does it merely decorate; rather, it articulates and propels the action, as this four-book sequence comes to seem less an outré experiment and more like a true novel of impressive scope.