Monsieur

Monsieur, or The Prince of Darkness (1974), is the first volume in Lawrence Durrell's The Avignon Quintet. Published from 1974 to 1985, this sequence of five interrelated novels explore the lives of a group of Europeans before, during, and after World War II. Durrell uses many of the experimental techniques of metafiction that he had integrated into his Alexandria Quartet, published 1957 to 1960. He described the later quintet as a quincunx. Monsieur is based on a metafictional narrative in five major sections, each with a competing narrator. The novel does not resolve which narrative is 'real' and which are 'fiction.' The novel was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1974. Background The novel draws extensively on Gnosticism, and this system of belief recurs as a plot element throughout the Quintet. Durrell had an interest in Gnosticism from the early 1940s and had studied Gnostic texts. According to critics James Gifford and Stephen Osadetz, for Monsieur, Durrell drew from Serge Hutin's Les Gnostiques, as he had marked numerous passages in his copy, as well as contemporary newspaper reports he held of a Slovenian suicide cult. These materials are held at the Bibliotheque Lawrence Durrell, Université Paris X, Nanterre.