Infernal Triangle

By John Skow

MONSIEUR by LAWRENCE DURRELL 305 pages. Viking. $8.95

Lawrence Durrell has always made better sound than sense, but his cadenzas are so splendidly overripe (the effect being that of Berlioz played by an orchestra of gondoliers) that his novels have not suffered in the least. They are clever, evocative, atmospheric and essentially unserious.

Monsieur is no exception. The au thor of the lush and intricate Alexandria Quartet here invents a novelist named Blanford, who invents a novelist named Sutcliffe, who caricatures Blanford mercilessly as "Bloshford," a bestselling hack. The book is one of those box-within-box amusements: Sutcliffe, as a character in a novel by Blanford, cracks up in the process of writing a novel in which he misinterprets the situations of some of his friends, other Blanford characters. These convolutions lead to the expectable mild ironies of viewpoint, but the plot is too sketchily developed to constitute the novel's reason for being. It seems rather to be a private joke at which Durrell, smiling at his own writerish tics, then smiles at himself smiling at himself.

This impression is supported by the equally sketchy handling of the novel's two other main scenes--each of them powerful enough to drive an 800-page novel of its own. The first is of a consuming and endearing love affair involving three Blanford characters (who are also written about disapprovingly by Sutcliffe). One of them is Bruce Drexel, an English doctor who has spent his life in the diplomatic service. The others are Piers de Nogaret, a French diplomat whose career paralleled that of Bruce, and Piers' fey sister Sylvie.

All three, in various combinations, have been lovers. As the novel opens, Bruce, who has retired, has been summoned to the Nogaret chateau near Avignon by the news of Piers' suicide. Sylvie, who slid sweetly into madness years before, lives near by in a mental hospital. Bruce, as imagined by Blanford, is swamped by memories. The most haunting and troublesome are of the young lovers' involvement years be fore in Egypt with a Gnostic cult that views the universe as "a quiet maggotry," and believes that the sorry state of the world began when the rightful, benign lord of creation was displaced by an evil usurper.

Sylvie and Bruce eventually dropped away from active membership, which included drug rites, snake worship and eating crackling wafers of mummy flesh.

But to Piers the ancient Gnostic beliefs became central. With a scholar friend, he linked the Gnostics' world-scorning pessimism with the still mysterious downfall of the Knights Templar. The Templars flourished as a chivalric order during the Crusades, eventually becoming one of the strong est financial, military and political forces in Europe, only to be swept away abruptly in the 14th century by the Inquisition on unconvincing charges of heresy and sexual deviation.

The theory advanced in Durrell's book is that the Templars were crushed because they had become Gnostics, and the implication is left in the air that they allowed themselves to be destroyed as an act of mass suicide. It is clear, at least, that Piers' own death was a Gnostic turning-away.

Obviously there is far too much material here for a conventional novel.

Durrell's book could be seen as a sheaf of sketches and diagrams for another quartet of novels, and the objection could be made that in its present form nothing really is carried through to completion. But as always, the real subject of Durrell's writing is the flow of astonishing sense impressions left by his elegant words. The book is light, intelligent and agreeable; it simply lacks the density to be important, and so much the worse for density.

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