Constance or Solitary Practices is a treasury of observations, the third in a planned series of five novels, set one inside the other like a set of Russian dolls. Each can be read independently, but the faithful reader who has followed the game step by step is rewarded by new-born images reflected in the other mirror-novels, each vaster in scope than the previous one, each acting on the others like a dream within a dream. Constance is the log-book of a poet.

Our times have not been kind to poets who venture into prose. Writing about Durrell in an essay precariously called "The Novel Today" (in The Pelican Guide to English Literature), Gilbert Phelps notes his dislike of him. He compares him unfavourably to Joyce Cary and Anthony Powell, complains about the superficiality of Durrell's characters, denounces the lack of sympathy between them and the reader, and finally credits Durrell only with "energy" that Phelps sees as "almost entirely cerebral." He says nothing of Durrell's poetic vision, nothing about Durrell's intention to create a picture of emotions ("not snapshots of people"), nothing about Durrell's concern with a clear vision of time, eternity, sexual longing, and the artist's despair in his effort to portray all this. "It is not the meaning that we need," reads one of his poems written in the 1970s, "but sight." With The Alexandria Quartet Durrell achieved part of this purpose; with Monsieur, Livia, and now Constance his achievement becomes even more evident. More than Powell (because Durrell is a better man with words), more than Cary (because his scope is wider), Lawrence Durrell has set out to observe our recent past and capture its mood, its essence. (p. 11)

Durrell knows that a writer does not change the present; he changes the past. He educates our recollections, bullies the ghosts of things that were into giving accounts of themselves, organizes dates and events and places in what Durrell calls "the filing cabinet of his memory." Durrell the writer signposts the dusky regions gone by for us to revisit if not in safety, at least in a kind of order that the brain will grasp and the heart will bear.

Durrell's country is the world at war in the 1930s and '40s: Alexandria, Paris, Geneva, and especially Avignon, the city of Rabelais, whose two towers are called "He-who-speaks" and "He-who-grumbles." Through these ghostly cities—ghostly because Durrell describes them as they once were, in days gone by—move the passions and desires of men and women. Writers, Nazi politicians, women in love, spies whose knowledge of the Secret Service comes from the bad style (not the plot) of Sherlock Holmes stories, characters created by characters, are invoked to say their piece. The plot is complex, too intricate to summarize, and ultimately not essential.

The art of the novel and the erotic sciences are two related subjects with which almost all of these people are obsessed. There are wild theories about [women, Hitler, and sex. Constance] … mainly conveys a feeling of loneliness…. Solitary Practices (the subtitle) refers not only to the masturbatory (that is, fruitless, egotistic) pleasures; it describes men and women in their lonely quest, above whom hovers Freud, the god custodian, "Old Fraud" as one of the characters calls him.

But, as in The Alexandria Quartet , the convoluted, tortured characters are superseded by the writing, which acts as a distancing, wise hand between the reader and the novel. It has the abstract quality of music…. The language, however, can also be clean-cut and explicit…. Even the epigrams are so astounding they barely need...