No 3 in this wonderful quartet. Mountolive is a career diplomat, who early in the book is posted to Alexandria where he has an affair with Leila, the mother of Nessim and Narouz, apparently sanctioned by her elderly husband. He commits a faux pas at a dinner with the family assuming thoughtlessly that they are Moslems (they are in fact Coptic Christians) and is lambasted by the elderly father for the historic dislike/respect for the Copts by the English and westerns generally.
He is posted abroad but misses Leila. Returning to Alexandria as ambassador, he is told by Pursewarden that British mistrust of this family is wholly misplaced, and is relieved due to his close friendship with them. But this appears wrong ; Pursewarden (who incidentally and possibly of prurient interest only has an incestuous relationship with his blind sister) has a drunken night with Melissa who tells him that the suspicions are well placed as one of her former lovers worked for them and revealed all to her. Astonishingly and ?(implausibly) this error is the cause of Pursewarden’s suicide, although it is odd that Nessim is in his room when the body is discovered.
It appears that neither Darley (the narrator of Justine) nor Pursewarden were really loved by Justine, she seduced them both, sanctioned by her husband , to see if either had any knowledge (Darley via Melissa) of their real activities, which are to fund a Palestinian state where Jews, Christians and other non Islamic middle easterns would be protected from the growing Islamic domination of the region. Mountolive has to release this information to the Egyptians and Narouz is sacrificed and murdered in a grim bargain with a corrupt Egyptian official who receives bribes concealed within a copy of the Koran which his supplicants bring to him. Wow!
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