Lawrence Durrell: Justine, Part I

Lawrence Durrell
Justine:  the first book in the Alexandria Quartet

This is my fourth visit to Alexandria with the aid of Lawrence Durrell, my personal tour guide.  Isn't that what writers are, guides to their worlds?  It has been some time since my last visit, so I had only the vaguest ideas of what was coming.  However, once I started, I began recognize some of what I was reading.

What came first was the memory of the initial confusion I felt when I began to read the novel.  Durrell doesn't believe, at least in Justine, straightforward chronological narrative structure.  Instead, I was faced with short paragraphs and brief references to characters, without any help from Durrell.  Here and there characters were brought up briefly and then off to something else.  It was only I had gotten a way into Part I that I began finding introductions to the characters but in a disjointed fashion, though.

This time though I understood what Durrell was doing.  As the narrator explains very early in the novel, the first page or so, he was going to put down on paper the events of the past year.  If I had decided to do something similar, it would have been difficult to begin as I know that all I would have been able to come up with at first would be fragments, disjointed,  and randomly recalled without any chronological order.  However, the longer I worked at it, the more material I would be able to bring up, and each memory would be accompanied by other memories.  So, as I got deeper into Part 1, I found the fragments were now longer and more complete.  If it had been me, though, I wouldn't have had to courage to include those first brief  fragments in my work, for I would have edited them out and produced a standard commonplace traditional account.  That, no doubt, is why Durrell is a great writer, and I am not.

While Durrell introduces some seven or eight characters, he returns again and again to two of them:  Justine and Melissa.  But, at first I found it difficult to immediately know just which one the narrator was referring to.  It's as if  the narrator mistakenly believes we are as familiar with Justine and Melissa as he is, so he really doesn't have to identify them immediately.   The male characters are introduced without the confusion that surrounded the female characters.  The males are named and their relationship to the narrator is spelled out and occasionally brought back into the narrative. 

As I mentioned earlier, the narrator doesn't provide his reader with a chronological sequence.  When we first meet Justine and Melissa, it quickly becomes clear that he is intimately involved with both of them.  It is only much later in Part I that we are told of their first meeting.  Then comes their first sexual encounter, but not necessarily in that order.

The Quartet, I find, consists of a number of character and plot threads that are intertwined throughout the story. Because of this, at times I simply stop reading, go back to the beginning of the novel, and follow a particular thread, ignoring whatever else is going on at that time.  It is surprising what I find when I do this, even if I limit it just to Part 1.

For example, let's follow the Justine thread and stop when we reach when we reach the part when the narrator tells us how and when they first met.  We first meet, or hear of her actually, on the first page when she is mentioned by the narrator as one of his friends: "Justine and Nessim, of Melissa and Balthazar.".  Several pages later, the narrator tells us that he has Justine's diary, which he got from her husband, Nessim, who still hoped that Justine would come back to him.  The narrator tells us that he believes he will never see Justine for he and his friends have "taken different paths now."  However, the narrator does have Melissa's child with him and tells us that he "has not named it yet.  Of course it will be Justine--who else?"

Several pages later we read that he catches a glimpse of her from his balcony.  In fact he has seen her many times and knows who she is, even though they haven't met.  He now mentions their many meetings at the cafe, El Bab. Again, pages later, we get a much fuller description of her, and it is obvious they have just been intimate.

Later, the narrator tells us that  he had once agreed to give a lecture on the 'poet of the city,' Cavafy, which was attended by "a dignified semicircle of society ladies."   Justine was in the audience.   He recognizes her, but they do not speak because they have yet to meet.  After the lecture, the narrator, that evening,  stops at a small cafe.  Justine suddenly appears and asks a question about the lecture.  Then she says, "I want to take you to Nessim, my husband.  Will you come?"  She drives them to the house and searched "from room to room, fracturing the silences.  He (Nessim) answered at last from the great studio on the roof and racing to him like a gundog she metaphorically dropped me at his feet and stood back, wagging her tail.  She had achieved me.


Nessim was sitting on the top of the ladder reading, and he came slowly down to us, looking first at one and then at the other. . .for my part, I could offer no explanation of my presence, since I did not know for what purpose I had been brought here."


If I may cheat here, the narrator believes, later, that  he knows why she approached him, gathered him up, and brought him to her husband.  But that's in Justine.  In the second book, Balthazar, he will hear a different explanation, and the reader will find yet one more in Mountolive.   

It is said that a sign of great literature is that one discovers something new in every reading.  That is certainly true of Justine.  Even though this was at least the fourth reading, I was surprised to discover clues,  interspersed in Part 1, to future events, some that will take place in the other volumes of the quartet.   The narrator would make some offhand remark and then go on to something else and would never refer to it again. It meant nothing to the narrator and nothing to me until this the fourth reading.  I should have picked up on them on subsequent readings.


I wonder what I will find on my fifth reading.