When Darley settles down with Clea to live happily ever after, the reader is more likely to sigh in disappointment than in satisfaction: we had thought there was more to [the Alexandria Quartet] than that, and indeed there was. The last volumes escape all too successfully from the baffling relativity which was the chief interest of the first two.

A mechanical but genuine source of power in the early books was multiple points of view. Quite apart from tacit transitions from one narrative eye to another, events were watched and recorded by three professional authors—Arnauti, Darley, and Pursewarden—in addition to diarists, letter-writers, and commentators, all of whose work was conveniently made available to the scribe…. In addition, we saw Darley at a variety of different stages in his career, and information was filtered into the novels from a number of different and competing intelligence agencies. All this made for an ingeniously interwoven fabric of times, places, and points of view, across which the reader's studious eye wandered in search of patterns and ever-deeper patterns. One part of the book called another into question; the various novelists circled around the problems of complex personalities in complex situations, throwing off ideas for novels which might or might not apply to the present one. All this uncertainty was more potent fictional stuff than any conceivable resolutions of it could be: especially since Durrell, though his characters are all erotically obsessed, and he himself proposes eros as an ultimate form of cognition, skimps actual erotic scenes and any definition of the knowledge gained from them as primly as any Victorian novelist…. (pp. 162-63)

Most of the romantic illusions in which the first text abounds are [in the second novel, Balthazar,] shattered by a more dispassionate and deeper-sighted observer—above all the romantic egotism with which Darley has experienced his affair with Justine. (In terms of prudential motivation, the question of why Justine, who's already involved in one massive intrigue, should jeopardize it by indulging in two others, with Darley and Pursewarden, never gets answered; but the novel's balance of forces is all the better for being precarious.) Balthazar, as invert, mystagogue, and medicine-man, is admirably suited to bring about these ironic counterpoints. Although this resource is not largely exploited, we sometimes see verbal tags familiar from one context given new resonance by being heard in another. (p. 163)

Alexandria usurps heavily on the Alexandrians; and Durrell, with a vivid pen for colors, smells, and popular oddities, can render a bazaar, a cheap cabaret, or a hunch-backed barber briefly and brilliantly. With profundities of thought or feeling he's less successful: the Cabala and the doctrines of the Gnostics remain bits of lifeless window-dressing, and the grand passions don't get much beyond the stage of cliché. Of course, that is one of the points of the tetralogy. With its gift for factoring people down to their common irreducible elements, it forms Nessim and Melissa, Darley and Justine into a crystalline quartet of compulsions and frustrations before which the explanations of time and history (whether personal or public) are relatively helpless. Racially and religiously the quartet is as balanced and unstable as the city itself, and its conflicts are quite as insoluble. But then solutions are not really in order; certainly the Joycean vision would not have encouraged Durrell to think that in Mountolive he could effectively lay out a political background along with an explanation of Pursewarden (so much better as an enigma than as a case history!) and in Clea score up a pseudo-Proustian ending-return. One senses that even though he carried it off, the romantic ending with Clea did not sit well on his artistic conscience, and in the desperate amputation of Clea's hand, he tried to set it off with a bit of strong stuff. But the redemption is very partial; and it's my own impression, having tried it both ways, that the tetralogy reads much more effectively backwards than forwards, which makes it wind up instead of winding down.

Among other things, the success of the first two novels is due to some consciously mosaic prose. Durrell is fond of writing what amount to epiphanies of Alexandria, though he never labels them as such. They are hard, brilliant, descriptive sketches, done with all the senses and nerves alight—really the finest pieces of writing in the sequence. It's an oddity that the man who writes so well can also fall into the weary, loose clichés of the romantic novelist…. Unfortunately, as the opportunity narrowed for the first sort of prose (Alexandria having already been presented to us in all its sharp immediacy), the second sort came more and more to predominate. And there are still other veins that the author has tapped, in this eclectic sequence of actions—Scobie, for example, who flows forth like a Pickwickian eccentric given his head, indefatigably and to some extent irrelevantly. One can sympathize with Durrell in feeling that he is too good to waste, yet among the major themes of the novel he hardly fits at all, and apart from his own rich self-display serves no purpose except to demonstrate Clea's charity and the city's polymorphic religiosity…. (pp. 164-65)

[There's] a lot of uneven work in the Quartet—a splash of metaphysical prestidigitation mixed with a swatch of exotic Oriental sex, some menace after the manner of E. Phillips Oppenheim, with homely Malaprop humor at the Sarah Gamp level. The books are written to impress, to dazzle, to titillate, to enthrall; there are sustained passages where they do these various things, but there are also areas where the flats betray crude painting, the machinery creaks, and the characters stand about contriving stage-business to conceal the fact that they really don't know what to do with themselves. Durrell is a superior entertainer, who has found various elements of Joycean composition useful in putting together his kaleidescope. But he's a long way from the cold and distant perspective of Joyce even toward his own creation; one doesn't get any equivalent feel for the architecture of a fiction. Durrell in the Alexandria Quartet was evidently in a delayed Stephen-Dedalus stage of development—his books are built more in the loose form of theme-and-variations than after the strict mode of a quartet. (pp. 165-66)