All The Time In The World

I’ve been reading The Alexandria Quartet since 1982. That’s the date inscribed on the book. I used to do that in my youth, write my name along with the date and sometimes the location. So that’s why I know Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea have been with me for 28 years.

I bought it in a Manchester bookstore, after an argument with my then Girlfriend. The theory was I would use-up my new free time getting to grips with Lawrence Durrell’s difficult books. And I knew they were difficult, because that’s all my old English teacher had to say about Lawrence Durrell.

She was teaching My Family and Other Animals, the memoir by his easier brother Gerald. Lawrence features in the book, so I suppose that’s how he managed to find his way into the classroom discussion. The Quartet was also still in fashion. George Cukor had a stab at filming Justine, with Dirk Bogarde as Pursewarden in the late sixties.

My break-up lasted a whole weekend, which just about got me past page one. The Alexandria Quartet‘s not a book of course, its four interwoven books, published at different times. Durrell quotes Sigmund Freud and De Sade at the beginning of Justine. And he was a difficult bugger, the sort of bugger who names his daughter after a lesbian goddess.

I know a little of what became of the English teacher, she left under a cloud. She was caught by her husband in flagrante delicto with a pupil. Why she chose to give the boy extra tuition in her home I have no idea. Gossip had her husband chasing the unfortunate schoolboy down the seafront, and blacking his eye.

The English teacher’s story would fit nicely into the gritty British New Wave, seeing that it happened in a dreary Northern Seaside town, a million miles from Alexandria. It would fit nicely into most TV Soaps; and a lot of plot driven potboilers.

So after I finish re-reading Richard Yates; I think its time to try Balthazar again. Put two fingers-up to East Enders et all. Annoy the hell out of my Jobcentre nemesis, who hates people reading before an interview. I’ve got all the time in the world.