Book 18: "Constance, or, Solitary Practices" by Lawrence Durrell
Wednesday, April 14th, 2010 12:15![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittiwakeBook 3 of the Avignon Quintet
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.
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.
