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PARTISAN REVIEW
of another exceedingly beautiful and moving novel set in Africa,
Veronica,
by Laura Pope, which appeared in England several years
ago, but I think has not been published here. Mr. Durrell's subject is
somewhat similar, though his intention, and perhaps some of his powers
of execution, are of greater scope.
Justine
is a love story, and a meditation on love; also, like several
major modem works, a novel about the novel, whose composition be–
comes the subject of itself. Several of the persons are novelists, others
keep diaries, the poet Constantine Cavafy, "the old poet of the city,"
is alluded to often, and quoted, as an emblematic presence; finally, a
little mysteriously, there is a character who shares with Graham Greene's
Scobie only the name of Scobie, a job on the police force, and Roman
Catholicism, but whose attitude to life is so formed as to constitute a
backhanded kind of literary criticism.
Among all these reflectors the plot unwinds somewhat deviously,
in fragmented and dispersed details which nonetheless form a pattern;
perhaps also some of its materials will be further illuminated in suc–
cessive novels of the projected series. The controlling metaphor, dif–
fused throughout the design, is I think that of all human action seen
as the search for knowledge: the exploration of self, the lovers' explora–
tion of one another, the detective adventures of jealousy, the psycho–
logical adventures into the past, the novelist's or diarist's probing for
motives and the cabalist's search for God, all are woven into a grand,
pervasive figure, which emerges most clearly in the discovery that a
religious study group and a talkative barber are also parts of a spy–
ring, giving a strange, ascending hierarchy of gossip, espionage, gnosis.
There is in all this a clear suggestion of allegory, rooted in Alexandria
itself as both city of many and city of God, and going back to "the
founders of the city, the soldier-god in his glass coffin. . . . Or that
great square Negro head reverberating with a concept of God con–
ceived in the spirit of pure intellectual play-Plotinus." This too I
should expect might be further developed in the sequel.
I resist the temptation of raising that cry of "masterpiece!" not
only because it is too much heard among us, but also because there
are some things puzzling about this book, which I shall read again. I
was even a trifle chilled at first by a tone of sophistication which I
thought condescending: "for those of us who feel deeply and are at
all conscious of the inextricable tangle of human thought there is only
one response to
be
made-ironic tenderness and silence." Such remarks
irritatingly tend to be parodies of themselves. But my doubts were soon
dispelled, and I was drawn into the world of the book by its seriousness
