Clea was published by Faber and Faber in 1960, completing The Alexandria Quartet. Where the first three novels occupied the same time period viewed from different perspectives (Durrell’s three spatial dimensions), Clea introduces the temporal dimension — time moves forward, and Darley returns to Alexandria during the war to find that everything has changed.
The characters who were trapped in the first three volumes — by desire, by politics, by self-deception — have been released by time into new possibilities. Justine has been broken by political failure and is rebuilding herself; Nessim has lost his fortune and found a different kind of dignity; Balthazar has emerged from despair; and Clea — the painter who was always peripheral in the earlier novels — becomes central, her artistic vocation representing a relationship to truth that the other characters’ obsessions obscured.
Clea herself is the novel’s moral center: an artist who sees clearly, who refuses the romantic self-deception that trapped Darley, and whose relationship with the narrator offers a possibility that his obsession with Justine could not — the possibility of genuine meeting between two people who see each other without illusion. Her near-death by drowning (harpoon through the hand) and subsequent transformation as an artist provides the Quartet’s climactic image: art born from suffering that is neither romanticized nor denied.
The novel concludes with a series of “workpoints” — notes for novels the characters might write — suggesting that the Quartet itself is provisional, that the story continues beyond its borders, and that no ending is truly final.
Collecting Clea
First edition (Faber and Faber, London, 1960): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First UK edition in dust jacket: $50–$150
- Signed first edition: $150–$400
- Complete Alexandria Quartet set (UK firsts, all four): $300–$1000
- US first (Dutton, 1960): $20–$50
- Without jacket: $10–$20