T he Avignon Quintet (Monsieur: Or The Prince of Darkness, 1974; Livia: Or Buried Alive, 1979; Constance: Or Solitary Practices, 1982; Sebastian: Or Ruling Passions, 1984; Quinx: Or The Ripper's Tale, 1985) presents a large cast of characters of diverse backgrounds, professions, and ethnicities: doctors, diplomats, novelists, psychoanalysts, Nazis, gypsies, an Egyptian bankergnostic, a Jewish plutocrat, an Egyptian prince. Most of the principle characters have doppelgangers. Although many aspects of the characterization resemble The Alexandria Quartet, it is not so much a matter of prismatic perspective, of retelling the same story from different viewpoints, as Durrell attempted in The Alexandria Quartet (1957-1960), as it is a duplication and reduplication of character and situation. One of Durrell's writer-narrator figures, Sutcliffe, dreams of writing a book "full of not completely discrete characters, of ancestors and descendants all mixed up," who would "walk in and out of each other's lives"; it would be a...