Feeling My Age

Photo: Dallas & Mary’s Oz to Eire 2010 blog

He entered the penumbra of the storm slowly, marvelling at the light, at the horizon drawn back like a bow.  Odd gleams of sunshine scattered rubies upon the battleships in the basis (squatting under their guns like horned toads).  It was the ancient city again; he felt its pervading melancholy under the rain as he crossed it on his way to the Summer Residence.

The brilliant unfamiliar lighting of the thunderstorm recreated it, giving it a spectral, storybook air – broken pavements made of tinfoil, snail-shells, cracked horn, mica; earth-brick buildings turned to the colour of ox-blood; the lovers wandering in Mohammed Ali Square, disoriented by the unfamiliar rain, disconsolate as untuned instruments; the clicking of violet trams along the seafront among the tatting of palm-fronds.  The desuetude of an ancient city whose streets were plastered with the wet blown dust of the surrounding desert.

He felt it all anew, letting it extend panoramically in his consciousness – the moan of a liner edging out towards the sunset bar, or the trains which flowed like a torrent of diamonds towards the interior, their wheels clattering among the shingle ravines and the powder of temples long since abandoned and silted up…/more
From Mountolive by Lawrence Durrell.

I read the Alexandria Quartet back in my twenties and recently bought the audiobooks, which are read by Jack Klaff. Actually Klaff’s delivery is a bit annoying with all the silly voices he puts on for the Egyptian characters, but Durrell’s dense vivid prose (“the clicking of violet trams”) is a sheer joy.

So many of the political issues in Mountolive – Egyptian nationhood, corruption, Israel, jihad, post-colonialism – are as compelling today as when they were written in the late 1950s