It is hot, it is muggy, it is dusty, and if it is not quite Alexandria, the smouldering summer in the Midwest post-Climate Change prepares you for Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quarter.  This neglected 20th century masterpiece is told in four novels, Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea, each named for a titular character.

Durrell was a brilliant poet, a translator of Cavafy, a humor writer, and a novelist.  His mesmeric style in The Alexandria Quartet is lush and poetic.  He intended the quartet to be read as one novel, though it can also be spaced over a long period of time. For a satisfying Durrell reading experience, head for that cafe with whirling fans on the ceiling and order an espresso.  No, air conditioning would be cheating.

Durrell mines his experience in Alexandria for the colorful characters, the derealization in the shimmering heat, and the intricate politics and conspiracies. The narrator, Darley, a novelist, is Durrell’s alter ego: he has “escaped” Alexandria and is living on an island, where he is writing about Alexandria. In the first volume,  Justine, Darley describes his love affair with Justine, a siren with a tragic past who sleeps with everybody. The other titular characters in the quartet are Balthazar, a doctor and a mystic, Mountolive, a diplomat who becomes Ambassador of Egypt, and Clea, an artist who is a shrewd observer of humanity.

If you don’t like luxuriant prose, you might want to try Durrell’s White Eagles over Serbia, a taut thriller set in the Balkans. Metuan, a spy, burned-out after an assignment in Malay,  is determined to retire and spend his leisure going fishing.  But Dombey, his boss,  entices him to accept the assignment: he can go fishing in the mountains of Serbia, where he is needed to investigate the murder of the former agent. Metuan, who knows the Serbian languages, will impersonate a peasant. And he takes his fishing rod.

Beautiful, spare writing and a good spy novel. It reminded me slightly of the actor John Quayle’s Eight Hours from England, a brilliant novel set in the Balkans during World War II.

N.B. Peter Stothard, former editor of the TLS, is the author of a fascinating book called Alexandria. He visited the city, looking for traces of the past, but no Cleopatra, and certainly no Lawrence Durrell.