Lawrence Durrell's The Avignon Quintet: an overall view (my view anyway)

The Avignon Quintet  (five novels)


Monsieur
Livia
Constance
Sebastian
Quinx  


The following quotation from Constance provides a glimpse into the workings of  The Avignon Quintet. 

"If real people could cohabit with the creatures of their imagination--say, in a novel--then what sort of children would be the fruit of their union: changelings?"


Lawrence Durrell
"The Avignon Quintet" (aka The Quincunx)

The following is my reading of the structure of  "The Avignon Quintet."  I don't know if it will make sense to anybody else, but it helps me keep the characters and events of the Quintet straight.    FL is the abbreviation for Fiction Level.


FL0:  Lawrence Durrell, the Person.

FL1:  Lawrence Durrell, the Novelist.   I read somewhere that the Person creates a fictional construct who is the writer, sometimes referred to as the second self or the implied author.  So, Lawrence Durrell, the Novelist, is a creation of of Lawrence Durrell, the Person, and it is this fictional construct who wrote  "The Avignon Quintet."   One might wonder about the common practice of pseudonyms or aliases adopted by many writers in this context.


FL2:  The Avignon Quintet:

Monsieur, the first novel, has a unique structure. It has five parts.  These five parts constitute the external or the Durrell Monsieur.   I call the first four parts the internal or Blanford Monsieur.  These four parts  contain the story of  Piers, Sylvia, and Bruce.  The fifth part of the Durrell or external Monsieur introduces the reader to Aubrey Blanford, who has "written" the internal Monsieur. 


The remaining four novels tell the reader of the lives of Aubrey Blanford and those around him.  As the readers go through these four novels, they see how Blanford has modified and combined the personalities of the people he knows and the events of their lives to create the characters in the first four parts of Monsieur.  
  
Major Characters in the Avignon Quintet:  Aubrey Blanford, Constance, Hillary, Sylvia,  Sam 



FL3:  Monsieur or The Prince of Darkness  (the internal or Blanford Monsieur)

This is the internal novel "written" by Aubrey Blanford.  It takes up the first four parts of the external or Durrell Monsieur.  The three most significant characters are Piers de Nogaret, his sister Sylvie, and Bruce Drexel, the narrator of the internal novel.  The three share a long, complex, and intimate relationship.  

Important characters:  Piers, Sylvie, Bruce, Sutcliffe, Pia, Toby,


What is most confusing is that the reader encounters FL3, the internal Monsieur, first and, moreover, doesn't realize what is going on until Part 5 when Aubrey Blanford is introduced.  At this point the reader then moves from FL3 to FL2.


But, these fiction levels are permeable.  Characters from FL3 frequently cross the line and interact with characters in FL2.  Some examples--

FL2:   Aubrey Blanford talks to Sutcliffe, the novelist he created in Monsieur, the internal novel.  At times it's difficult to determine whether Sutcliffe is only Blanford's sounding board, existing only in his mind, or whether Sutcliffe has  somehow become an independent person at Blanford's level. However, in Constance, the third novel in the Avignon Quintet,  Constance meets Sutcliffe and Pia, who have now  moved from FL3 to FL2. 

FL3:  Sutcliffe, a character in Blanford's internal novel,  says he wrote a novel about Bruce, Piers, and Sylvie.  His novel  begins with the same words that Blanford begins his novel, the internal Monsieur in FL2.

While reading the Quintet, I couldn't help thinking about Philip K. Dick, the SF writer who delights in creating works in which the boundary between reality and fantasy blurs and frequently disappears.

To add to the fun, Durrell sends several of his characters to Alexandria during WWII and also brings  in several characters from The Alexandria Quartet: Pursewarden and Melissa, while two members of the British military in Egypt, Maskelyne and Telford, make brief appearances. The two series, The Alexandria Quartet and The Avignon Quintet, overlap chronologically, both taking place during WWII.


Some of the themes and issues brought up in The Avignon Quintet

--the German occupation of France during WWII
--Gnosticism
--the Knights Templar and their lost treasure
--various forms of love
--Provence and Alexandria, although Provence is the place where most of the novels take place
--Freud and psychoanalytic theory

I find The Avignon Quintet a complex and, at times, a confusing work, which may account for much of my interest in it.  I've now read it at least twice, and possibly three times now.  No doubt, I shall reread it in the near future.

I hope I haven't confused you too much.