"To hell with all this verbiage!" - The Prince

The fourth volume of Lawrence Durrell's Avignon Quintet feels surprisingly slim, clocking in just on 200 pages. It also feels far lighter, and occasionally repetitive, as if the 71-year-old Durrell knew he was no longer capable of his early flights of majesty. (At one point, for example, he describes an object as "slightly ovoid, almost egg-shaped", which seems redundant.)

It says something that my review of Sebastian (1983) is only the second on Goodreads (and the first in English). This series is a curio at best, has nothing on his previously Alexandria Quartet and little of the comedy that makes his casual writings so absorbing. Although I thoroughly enjoyed Monsieur, and thought Livia had passages of astounding beauty, the third volume - Constance was a write-off. This one's a step-up in part because it is comparatively focused on the twin lives of Constance and Sebastian, aka Affad. But it rather feels like Durrell has literally lost the plot.

The book details Affad's desire to find the letter informing him of his death, as per the practice of his Gnostic cult, and of Constance's attempts to deal with two patients - a psychopath who will ultimately get his revenge, and Affad's young son who is apparently on the autism spectrum. Neither of those clinical cases come to much, and despite the fact that the shading of Sebastian's character was the only good thing about the previous book, he is here reduced to the status of plot functionary. (The novel bears his name because of his importance to Constance, rather than his own driving of the narrative.)

It's interesting to note in passing that the majority of the French phrases are then translated into English by the relevant character, something you'd never catch 1950s Durrell doing. It feels a little like his editors had sternly impressed upon the old man that, in the 1980s, average readers could no longer be assumed to be bi- or tri-lingual as in days of yore.

The novel is also filled with the most peculiar rants. Naturally, being set in late '45 and early '46, the "Jewish question" is on everyone's mind - especially the Jewish characters - but Durrell's intense debates are so abstract or niche that it's hard to gain purchase. The Gnosticism remains more interesting in theory than execution, and isolating Constance from our broad cast of supporting characters for most of the book renders these chapters with a feeling of passing vignettes - like the author has already promised a quintet, but now he has to get through this annoying filler of a fourth book. The reader feels viscerally cheered when - in the closing reels - all of our regulars book tickets on the same train bound for Avignon.

"Why should man be the only animal who knows better but always fares worse?" - Schwarz

Aside from a touching cameo appearance by a character from Alexandria (in flashback), the novel lacks much of the power that Durrell once had. There are no extended landscape pieces as in the previous volumes, and - aside from a brief fireworks display in Geneva - nowhere for the author to stretch his palette. During an intermittently funny subplot in which Lord Galen is tasked with deciding which pieces of Western literature are "cornerstones" (people are assuring him that every American novel fits the bill, which has driven him to literal madness), the Lord goes on a bitter rant against Joyce's Ulysses. Blanford's response makes it clear we are meant to disagree, but what stood out to me was that Galen's monologue feels distinctly Joycean - but I could no longer tell whether Durrell meant to do this, or whether he was just writing one of his occasional unhinged screeds. The master muted. The meta-fictional elements of the previous novels are also largely tossed to the side, apart from the usual Blanford/Sutcliffe badinage. It's only in the final chapter that Durrell begins to further dismantle our understanding of how the world works; remember that the characters we met in book one turned out to be allegedly fictional. The final pages are intriguing, at least, in that they suggest Quinx will return to this subject matter.

I will need to read a Durrell biography after Quinx, as I'm fascinated to know how much of this sequence was planned in advance, and how much of it evolved as things went on. I can't help feeling disappointed by this sequence, and even if the fifth book is a masterpiece it won't be able to make up for the longueurs of the series. There is plenty of grist here for a scholar, no doubt, but little to entice even a committed Durrellite like me back for a second read. ( )

Book four of the Avignon Quintet; 1171 pages down out of a total 1370 pages. It is hard to say much more. This book was possibly less bad than some of the previous volumes. There was less ponderous nonsense posing as philosophical asides and fewer references to inane comments supposedly scribbled in writers' notebooks. But the same themes - so-called Gnostic group, the odd love triangles, absent or mad or both lovers or siblings. There are also echoes back to the Alexandria Qartet, as if to give this drivel stature by linking to the rlated themes in the earlier multi-volume set. But it doesn't work. One book to go. At least they are getting shorter. Read September 2011. ( )

"You are still showing your vulnerability," she told herself, and with the thought a wave of hatred swept over her - hatred for Affad and the appalling game of cat's cradle he was playing with her attachment. Damn him! And damn that collective of dismal death-worshippers projecting their infantile death-wish out of a ruined Egypt! "I though the Germans were infantile enough," she said to herself, "and that the Mediterranean races were older and wiser . . . what a fool! How naive can you be?"

As the war draws to a close, this book focuses on Constance's affair with Affad, and the disappearance of the letter from the council of the gnostic sect which was to have told him the date of his upcoming death. I took even more of a dislike to Constance, who shows herself to be a very unprofessional psychoanalyst; she shares information about her patients with her friends, starts a relationship with a patient, and is negligent of her own safety and that of everyone around her. Even her one professional success in this book is probably a fluke.

At least this book was shorter than the first three, at only 202 pages. Now I have read four of the books in this series, I suppose I should read the last one in the hope that it ties up some of the many loose ends, although as this series is a quincunx rather than a linear progression, I am not holding out much hope. ( )