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Intrigue Is the Way of Life By DONALD BARR

There is a story of a camel who, about to wade across a river, was solicited by a scorpion: "Gentle camel, carry me across your back. I cannot swim." The camel answered: "I am afraid to, gentle scorpion. You might sting me, and then I would die." "Gentle camel," said the scorpion, "be reasonable. I have no cause to sting you, besides, if you died I would drown." The camel allowed the scorpion to mount, and halfway across the stream, the scorpion stung. "Ah, scorpion," said the dying camel, "now you will drown. Why did you do it? Why?" The scorpion sighed: "You forget -- this is the Middle East."

This Levantine air -- of murderous duplicity treated almost as a sad duty, of glistening opaque minds, of fatal actions that seem to spring from the place rather than the will -- hung heavy over the first two novels of Mr. Durrell's tetralogy about the five sexes and nightmare politics of Alexandria. But in the new volume, "Mountolive" (The Book-of-the-Month Club selection for April), that sweet, dreadful ambiguity is the subject, not the style.

Mr. Durrell's announced design is to model the series on "the relativity proposition" in physics, plotting the same events in different frames of reference. In "Justine" we saw the Jewish wife of a great Coptic banker through the eyes of one of her lovers, an English schoolmaster-poet: she is a ravening and (even by Egyptian standards) disastrous nymphomaniac, obsessed by a childhood outrage and a kidnapped child. In "Balthazar" her lover reexamines his narrative in the light of data given him by a dear, wise friend, a homosexual doctor and cabalist: the passion recorded in "Justine" is now seen as a mere feint to cover a quick, opaque adultery with another Englishman, the poet-novelist Pursewarden.

In "Mountolive" the infidelities and hysterics, the tendernesses and murders, are exposed to the glare of direct narration. Gone is the sick retrospect of the little poet who tells things not in the order in which they happened but in the order in which they "become significant" to him; gone is the word "love" that darkeneth counsel (but we have probably not heard the last of it); and the facts are expounded in terms of a political conspiracy forming over the handsome, innocent head and under the trim, uncertain feet of the new British Ambassador, Sir David Mountolive. All the events fall into apparently rational order; all the superb erotic apparatus of Justine Hosnani and all the shy dignified agony of Nessim Hosnani are political utensils; and all the poor poet's exquisitely construed data are seen as fragments and figments and cunning forgeries.

Mountolive, as a promising Foreign Office junior, was posted to Egypt, where he met with the brothers Hosnani and fell in love (eros or agape, who can say?) with their lovely mother. In England he encountered Pursewarden, who combines humor and sensibility, integrity and cynicism, in commanding fashion. Now the middle-aged diplomat learns the fatuity of extending love and respect into trust. The Copts are conspiring with the Jews of Palestine; the Egyptians have made a ritual of corruption; the Powers intriguing in a city where intrigue has been a way of life for twenty-three centuries.

In this simpler narrative, Mr. Durrell's vertiginous erudition, his felicity of phrase and his astonishing powers of description are less indulged, but they are here. His gift for gamy minor characters is as fragrant as ever. The intellect cannot dwell on love, because love does not dwell in the intellect; love is written about in events, not in description. In "Mountolive" the intellect is allowed to play on intelligible politics, while the varied pangs of love are implicit in the actions and customs of the wicked city of Alexandria. This is a work of splendid craft and troubling veracity.

Mr. Barr is an American writer who specializes in the criticism of English literature.

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Last updated: April 22, 2004.