Mountolive was published by Faber and Faber in 1958, the same year as Balthazar. The third volume represents a radical shift in technique: where the first two novels were first-person, lyrical, and subjective, Mountolive is told in conventional third person, with the clarity and authority of diplomatic prose — because its perspective is that of David Mountolive, the British Ambassador to Egypt, and its subject is the political reality that the earlier novels’ romantic obsessions obscured.
Through Mountolive’s eyes, the reader learns that Justine’s husband Nessim Hosnani is involved in a conspiracy to arm Palestine — that what appeared in Justine and Balthazar as personal drama was also political operation, that the characters’ movements were constrained not only by desire but by ideology, and that the colonial situation (British power, Egyptian subjection, the approaching war) determines everything.
The shift to third-person narration is the point: objective narration, Durrell implies, is also a perspective — the perspective of power, of the state, of the institution that requires clarity and certainty in order to act. Mountolive’s understanding of events is no less partial than Darley’s or Balthazar’s; it is merely partial in a different direction — seeing political motive where the others saw love, seeing conspiracy where the others saw passion.
The novel’s tragic center is Mountolive’s youthful love affair with Nessim’s mother, Leila — a relationship that began in innocence and is destroyed by the very political forces that Mountolive now represents.
Collecting Mountolive
First edition (Faber and Faber, London, 1958): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First UK edition in dust jacket: $60–$180
- Signed first edition: $150–$400
- US first (Dutton, 1959): $25–$60
- Without jacket: $10–$25