Many readers who were adolescents in the late 1950s and early 1960s will have on their shelves old Faber paperbacks of Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea, gathering dust along with that pilfered hardback edition of Dylan Thomas's poems and The Catcher in the Rye. Durrell's intensely "poetic" portrait of his little band of lovers in pre-war Alexandria lifted one out of Catholic Ireland into a realm of pure romance masquerading as art. The amorous doings and undoings of Justine, Nessim, Melissa, Clea and the rest amount to little more than Higher Silliness, but the one character dominating all four books, Alexandria itself, is unforgettable. Durrell's melon-ripe prose is the perfect medium for catching the sights and sounds and smells of the Mediterranean and North Africa: "A sky of hot nude pearl until midday, crickets in sheltered places, and now the wind unpacking the great planes, ransacking the great planes . . ." Ignore the lovers, and look at the scenery instead.