What would they do with the new world which would be born when once the guns fell silent? They did not know, for the old would be somehow buried in the fateful silence of peace.”

Durrell - the master of late modernist fragmentary point-of-view series after his Alexandria Quartet - has gone deeper down the rabbit hole in his Avignon Quintet but this third volume suggests he's tunneling in the wrong direction. I quite enjoyed the absurd ramblings of Monsieur, or the Prince of Darkness and although I had my qualms, Durrell captured the beauty of multiple landscapes in Livia, or Buried Alive. But the third instalment, Constance, or Solitary Practices is bloated, and one can't help wondering if the author's age and preoccupations got the better of him.

Taking place between the early days of WWII (when "peace was not yet mortally stricken - but... a patient unconscious on a table, bleeding to death") to the hectic spring of 1944, Constance sees our five young heroes, as well as the Egyptian Prince, scattered across the Mediterranean. Aubrey Blanford joins the Prince on diplomatic duties in Egypt; Hilary and Sam report for active service; Constance joins the Red Cross on the continent; and Livia... well, she's been lost to Nazism. In fractured moments, we witness them (except Hilary, who remains a somewhat abstract addition to the cast) battle moral and philosophical dilemmas, by the end of which two of them will be deceased.

We've been aware from the first page of book one that this series would have much to say on subjects of Gnosticism, human sexuality, and Freud. But I didn't realise quite how much. Placing Constance - a therapist - at the heart of this novel allows Durrell to immerse us in Freudian psychology, rivers of menstrual blood, and so much else. Thankfully, it brings us the engaging character of Sebastian Affad, Constance's Egyptian lover, who brings his own matching set of emotional baggage, but one feels that the touch of an editor is far too light here - perhaps a sign of Durrell's recognised importance by this stage in his career.

Aside from the above, we are treated to some showy postmodernism, which is beginning to string together the separate plots of the first two books, with the arrival of the (previously revealed to be fictional) Toby, Sutcliffe, Pia and Trash into the "real" world of our WWII characters! Whether this will be taken anywhere satisfying remains to be seen, but it's at least distracting to the mind. (Frustratingly, though, one feels like we have missed out on ever getting to understand Livia, the misguided and possibly regretful Nazi, in lieu of Sutcliffe/Blanford badinage.)

Most interesting to me as a reader in 2018 are Durrell's insights into WWII, and to the thought processes of Hitler and the stand-in Nazi characters here. Durrell occasionally falls into the pitfalls of historical writing, where characters are either wickedly insightful about what is going on, and have seeming precognitive powers when it comes to predicting what will happen after the war. But the author has such fun morally demolishing the Nazis (a soldier who wets the bed from an unresolved issue of teenage shame; the Catholic general trying to find a place to confess his sins, only to realise the priest to whom he is confessing has a Jewish background; Hitler himself, keeping a shrunken head next to his bed in the hope it will tell him how to win the war), it's hard not to enjoy it. The sequences in Avignon, under Nazi control and peopled by citizens who fall somewhere along the spectrum from "collaborator" to "passive participant" make for engaging and morally conflicting reading. The questions of collaboration, and of how cultures shift so suddenly, feels pressingly relevant.

From time to time,Durrell betrays his once magisterial powers of description and character insight. Southern France and Egypt retain their "spirit of place" here, and Constance's musings on her relationship with Affad - on how two people from such different cultures can find each other, yet not quite understand each other - are powerful in their elegaic beauty.

Still, I can't help feeling Constance is far too long and unfocused. (I note that both Sebastian and Quinx- the remaining volumes - sit on my shelf looking very slender indeed.) The book is not a success, or rather its setpieces and insights are bold and powerful, but are parceled out intermittently in a haze of unrestrained wordiness. (As I have discussed the issue of race and gender in previous reviews, I will not do so here, except to say that the same problems recur but are also somewhat alleviated by the overall subject matter and evident sympathy for the side of freedom.)

I came close to upgrading this review to three stars, however, based on the final chapter, "The City's Fall", which is a little masterpiece, revealing that Durrell had by no means lost his power. As the Nazis pull out of Avignon in 1944, we witness the disgruntled General unable to convince sappers to help him blow the place to smithereens, the beguiling destruction of the mental asylum and the richly Zola-esque symbolism of the patients returning to their lives, and the heartbreak of the people's return to their city, the spirit of revenge, and a brutal farewell to one person in particular. I decided not to upgrade the review, since I read this book more fascinated by Durrell's mindset than by the book itself. Still, while I doubt Avignon will ever be Alexandra I remain hopeful that we've moved past a particular bump in the road, and will quickly carry on to Sebastian. It's not that I didn't enjoy these "sporadic annotations on the margins of history", to quote Durrell here, or the occasional cameos from characters of that earlier quartet! But I suspect these characters would be happier with either more of a narrative framework or less.

Perhaps I should end by quoting Blanford, imagining his mother, who may have said upon his birth: "This one will be introspective, cut off from ordinary life, proficient in solitude, but subject to enchantments because of his insight."

( )

The third volume of the Avignon Quintet by Lawrence Durrell. This book has more narrative flow than the earlier two volumes, but remains clogged with ponderous nonsense about gnostic beliefs, the Templars, sex and orgasms, and entirely forgettable asides from characters. There are some mildly amusing aspects - the character who is actually a character created in a novel written by one of the other characters; and the closing scene with the escaped psychiatric patients joining the townsfolk for the celebrations on the departure of the Nazis. But high points are few and far between. Much of the book is unreadable, and I imagine that the Quintet is increasingly unread. Why do I continue reading? Am I the only person in the world reading this set of five tedious books this year? It is Durrell's centenary next year. I expect it to be a quiet event. Read September 2011. ( )

Immortality must feel something like this for a poet. Suppose I were to tell you that here, in perfect peace, we sail eastward under cloudless skies upon a windless cerulean sea with not one Homeric curl in it . . . The Khedive is the royal yacht which is carrying us to Egypt and safety. No, it is totally unreal to find myself here under an awning of brightly striped duck, lounging beside the calm Prince, drinking a whisky and soda with grave reflective delight. Contemplating the abyss which has opened at our feet - the war.

Europe is on the brink of war, and the young people who spent the summer at Tu Duc are about to go their separate ways. Constance is returning to Geneva to finish her psychoanalytic studies after a hurried marriage to Sam who has already joined up, Livia has disappeared and is thought to be in Germany, Felix will move on to another posting after closing down the Avignon consulate, and Blanford is hoping to escape the war entirely by going to Egypt as the Prince's secretary.

Sutcliffe and Toby turn out to be real people, much to the surprise of Constance who meets them in Geneva when Sutcliffe's wife Pia becomes her patient. However, both Blanford and Sutcliffe still see them as being characters invented by Blanford, and when Blanford and Sutcliffe finally meet, they discuss the book(s) they are writing, which are two versions of the same story. So it's all very convoluted, with much blurring of the boundaries between what is real and what is not. The story doesn't even really match what happened in the earlier books in the series. According to them, Blanford has a long unhappy marriage with Livia, who tortures him for years with her manipulative behaviour, mysterious disappearances and lesbian affairs, but in this book their relationship only really lasts for a single summer in 1939. By the time the war starts, they may be married or engaged (it's not clear which as it only says that Blanford has given Livia a ring), but Livia has disappeared into Germany, and by the end of the war she is dead, so they never meet again. I suppose this is linked to the way that in the first book it was never clear to me whether Sutcliffe's wife Pia was dead, or if he just wrote about her as if she was dead because he couldn't bear that she had left him.

I liked this book rather more than I enjoyed "Livia", the previous book in this series. The only part I didn't enjoy was when Constance and Affad got together. There was way too much information about the first time they made love (blood everywhere!) and for me it went rapidly downhill from there, with Constance becoming increasingly annoying as she wholeheartedly embraced Affad's odd theories on relationships between men and women, and expounded on them to anyone who would listen. ( )