Alexandria, au revoir!

What is it about North Africa that leads novelists writing in English to write so disappointingly?  Not that Durrell does not have some good characters (the cabalist Balthazar, the lesbian painter Clea, above all the wealthy Copt Nessim) and some good scenes (the duck hunt which takes up most of Part Three is genuinely fascinating and suspenseful) but the exoticism which had lured me to read the book is overwhelmed by crudity and metaphysical blathering.  The writing is frequently arresting, and the thought is often provocative, but Justine the character is a frightful bore (I have always found neurotics entirely uninteresting) and the narrator-protagonist Darley is weak, spineless, and cruel to the hapless Melissa.

Nessim's descent into madness is the only element of dramatic suspense in the novel.  Minor characters like Pombal, Scobie,  the furrier Cohen, are interesting but essentially unnecessary; like much of the novel, they might have been edited out with hardly any loss.

It is difficult to finish a novel when neither of the main characters seem to possess enough character that we care whether they are run over by a streetcar or kidnapped by Bedouins.  Durrell may have shot his bolt with me, occasional lines of great poetic beauty notwithstanding.

349 days, 48 novels, 48 books of non-fiction to go.