Books: The Carnal Jigsaw

CLEA (287 pp.)—Laurence Durrell—Duffon ($3.95).

In this new novel, the fourth volume of a quartet, Author Durrell continues his absorbed investigation of contemporary Alexandria, the 2,000-year-old Egyptian seaport that he calls the "royal city and the anus mundi." Durrell delightedly wanders Alexandria's dust-tormented streets, blinks in its lemony sunlight, and pokes curiously through its stews, brothels, and hysteric festivals. Keeping him company is a clutch of God-haunted characters who live, love and die with tautly stretched minds.

Here again are Durrell's ravening women: handsome, black-browed Justine, a nymphomaniac with a neurotic need of intrigue; large-eyed, blonde Clea, who, when stripped, looks as "naked and slender as an Easter lily"; and blind Liza, still dotty with love for her suicide brother Pursewarden. Here, too, are his strangely ineffectual men: Nessim, the Coptic millionaire, in trouble both with his wife Justine and the British government; Dr. Balthazar, the homosexual cabalist; Mountolive, the stiff-necked British ambassador; and Darley, the Irish schoolteacher, who tries to put together the carnal jigsaw puzzle of his friends.

Contradictory Truth. In the three earlier books, time stood still as Novelist Durrell sought to prove how any single event can be variously interpreted by different participants. In Justine, Purse-warden's suicide is attributed to acedia, or boredom with life; Balthazar suggests that the suicide was caused by his failure as an artist; in Mountolive, the motive becomes purely political; and now in Clea, it seems established that Pursewarden took his life in an ironic expiation of his incestuous love for his blind sister. Durrell's point: "Truth is what most contradicts itself."

In Clea, which opens several years after the events of the first three books, time marches forward again. After selfexile on an Aegean island. Irishman Darley returns to Alexandria, still asking questions, still getting dusty answers. Justine, the great intriguer, has grown older and suffered a stroke: a drooping eyelid gives a leering expression to her rouged and overpowdered face. She climbs again into Darley's bed, and he flees her, shuddering. But Darley must love someone, and he turns to blonde Clea. Her words after they make love are the same ones spoken by Justine in the first volume of the quartet: "I am always so bad the first time, why is it?" And Darley makes his very same answer: "So am I."

Contrived Melodrama. Some echoes of the earlier books are intentional, but Clea has about it a curious air of repeated conversations, slapdash structure, and contrived melodrama. The cruel Memlik Pasha, who in Mountolive "never smiled," is brought onstage in Clea "smiling gently." A girl named Fosca is introduced only so that she may be strangely murdered, ,. and Clea herself is horribly and pointlessly maimed by a fishing spear.