In his head note to Balthazar, Durrell indicates that his primary concern in The Alexandria Quartet is "an investigation of modern love." The range of "modern love" investigated includes everything from old-fashioned "womanizing" to entangled homosexual and bisexual passion, from rape to intricate incestuous relationships, from child and adult prostitution to inverted masturbatory fantasy, from unrequited love to traditional marriages compounded with political intrigue, from simple "loving-kindness" to life-affirming heterosexual relationships based on a "tenderness" which is at once sexual and spiritual. Some readers have been confused by or outraged with Durrell's ostensible refusal to moralize about these tangled lines of love, to establish parameters of "good" and "evil" in his teeming Alexandria of the flesh and spirit. Yet Durrell's design precludes judgment: He presents the ruck and moil of the terrain of the human heart, and he demonstrates, through a deliberate employment of notions of...