Book of a lifetime: The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell

From The Independent archive: Fiona Sampson on being hoooked by the throwaway intelligence of a great postmodern novel

Durrell’s giant imaginative step out of time and caste argues that self-determination is the fundamental human drive (National Library of Israel)

The first time I read The Alexandria Quartet, I did so out of order, borrowing whichever volume appeared next on the public library shelves. However, that coloured my experience, I was bowled over. Written by someone of whom I’d heard only as the butt of Gerald Durrell’s family jokes, it was more enticing, as well as more opaque, than anything I’d ever read. I loved the way it scarcely seemed able to contain all that it had to say. I was hooked by its throwaway intelligence. And since I was a teenager I also loved its mystified sophistication, of the kind I was certain awaited me in the big city.

It wasn’t until I was in my twenties and owned a single-volume edition that I realised this first great postmodern novel divulges more, rather than less, with each retelling of its central events: a series of encounters between an all-too-flawed cast of colonial trespassers and native Alexandrians. The simple device of nested accounts, each offering revelations that undermine certainties, abolishes narrative authority at a stroke. It was my first recognition that one needn’t trust what one is told. Later, I also understood how brilliantly it deconstructed colonialism.

Justine bests the inevitable white male protagonist because of the gaps in his story. He fails to understand the city, and the woman, he believes he loves. Durrell’s giant imaginative step out of time and caste, as well as literary convention, argues that self-determination is the fundamental human drive: more important than even love or sex, whose conventional hold on fiction he subverts. This was incendiary stuff for a girl from the provinces.