Alexandria — its Arabic name — El Iskandariya. The title of the novel exists in two languages, two sounds, two ways of hearing the same place, two images, and perhaps more than one way of seeing. 

This is the story of two women who meet by chance in the spring of ‘89 in Paris. One is a bag lady, Mme. Giraudoux, who survives by telling stories and reading palms for a glass of wine and a metro ticket. The other, Anna, is an Australian Astronomer in Paris for a conference. Assured that her life is going to plan until on her way home one evening she enters a nearby cafe in the rue Mouffetard. There she sees Mme. Giraudoux. As she sits and listens to the story the bag lady tells she is struck by an uncanny string of memories which cause her to return to the cafe night after night. She becomes oddly obsessed as she begins to realise that the story the old woman is relating about Alexandria during the second world war has a lot in common with her own fragmented and lost origins. As the story unfolds the coincidences become greater and greater until Anna is convinced that this woman is in some way connected to her.  The novel is divided into four sections — The Café, Alexandria, The Maze, The Minotaur - each part guided by a principle of Astronomy.

 The Café

The first part of the novel, set in the Paris of '89, reflects the principle of gravity — the observation that all physical things in the universe exert a force of attraction on all other things. The café is the nucleus and fragility the shared characteristic of those who gravitate towards it. Here Mme. Giraudoux listens to and reads the palms of those whose lives are at a crossroad. Here she begins the story of how she, Adriane, a young dancer in Alexandria on the eve of the Second World War, fell in love with Gilles, a French painter who earned his living as a photographer.   The chapters are organized in a repeated pattern: Anna; Cafe; Alexandria. The Alexandria fragments are told in present tense with the intention of laying the ground for the central part of the Alexandria story. The structure also involves a symmetry between the Anna and Café sections inspired by Monet's Nymphéas.

Alexandria

The second part, is set during the Second World War in Alexandria, Egypt. The events depicted here take place between July 1942 (the first battle of Alamein) and November 1942 (the second Alamein).

Alexandria represents the core of the bag lady’s memories — her love affair with Gilles, told in third person — concerns the way in which both of the characters reveal themselves through the painting of a portrait. This section is based on the principle of Light – so the theme here is not only of things seen and unseen, explored through the frame of painting/ photography/camouflage but also the nature of ‘insight’.

The story is divided into three sections accented by a set of counterpoints: the same moment repeated from two different points of view.

The Flap, describes Anna's reconnection with Gilles during an air raid;

The Third Portrait describes how painting her allows him to 'see', to understand her;

The Second Alamein, contains the unravelling of their relationship and the disappearance of the child which underpins the framing story - that of the relationship between the Astronomer and the bag lady. 

The Maze

The third part of the novel returns to the Paris of 1989. Anna, convinced now that Mme. Giraudoux is connected to her in some way, begins to follow her as she roams through the streets of Paris like the rooms of a house. Finally they meet in the old church of St. Medard. What ensues is an alternating set of fragments between the rest of the Alexandrian story, and Anna’s attempts to discover her identity.

The Maze is governed by the principle of Space – the exploration of different kinds of space- internal and external.  Here both Michel Foucault and Helen Cixous elucidate a tangible way of thinking/writing about  'spaces' of being:

Foucault in his lecture on Heterotopias describes some of them:

 As the work of Bachelard and the Phenomenologist have taught us we do not live in a homogeneous and empty space, but on the contrary in a space thoroughly imbued with quantities and perhaps thoroughly fantasmatic as well. The space of our primary perception, the space of our dreams and that of our passions hold within themselves qualities that seem intrinsic: there is a light, ethereal, transparent space, or again a dark, rough, encumbered space; a space from above, of summits, or on the contrary a space from below of mud; or again a space that can be flowing like sparkling water, or space that is fixed, congealed, like stone or crystal.  

In Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, Helen Cixous talks about one of these spaces and the word she uses is 'imund', a world below, beneath, a world negated – what Foucault in his text Heterotopias calls the space from below of mud – this is the landscape, Cixous says, that Jean Genet describes in his novel The Miracle of the Rose, in which the chains of a prisoner condemned to death in Mettray Prison transform into a garland of flowers.  

 In the novel the descriptions of space are intended to function as a vehicle for conveying a particular kind of experience.  In the central section 'Alexandria,' Adriane's alienation is described through the domestic spaces she inhabits and her relation to them. Gilles' perception of the desert at night points to an inner camouflage. There is, too, the way that space is represented in his paintings, and its corresponding parallel to the state/space in which Adriane and Gilles find themselves. In the novel, exile also means to be thrown out of oneself, to be unhoused. Anna’s nightmares, consisting of sounds and smells, which unnerve her because she cannot place them, seep into her days. Her challenge is to find home within herself. For Adriane exile comes through living on the border of two cultures – her own, the Arab, and the other, the Western culture into which she is thrown by marrying a wealthy Italian banker. She dresses in chic Parisian clothes and is no longer allowed to speak her language. Her affair with Gilles seals the border and she can no longer return to her former self.

The Minotaur   

The last part of the novel, the Minotaur, is based on the principle of Time and details a slow unravelling of the truth.  The bag lady admits that she has stolen the stories. A set of questions is posed. They are really Anna’s questions, which involve her facing her own feelings, her own indifference. She takes this journey through two groups of photographs that Mme. Giraudoux leaves for her. In so doing she is forced to confront her own inner landscape, which for her constitutes the Minotaur. The truth for the bag lady is of a different order; the stories she has inhabited have given her a way of connecting to people which she never had before. For her fiction has become 'truth'.

Structure in the novel involves repetition, counterpoint and intersections.  The Alexandrian story is seeded as independent third person fragments in the first quarter up to the point where it becomes a stand-alone story based on a set of counterpoints. In the Maze and The Minotaur the structure is provided by a set of intersecting  shifts of points of view.

Michael Haag's, Alexandria, City of Memory (10) in conjunction with E.M. Forster's, A Guide to Alexandria, (11) both provided additional information concerning the city. Forster's reference described Alexandria in the twenties and thirties while Michael Haag's text extended the overview to the Second World War including earlier references to Forster and his lover Mohammed, whose appearance and profession is attributed to a minor character in the novel (Leila's lover).

El Iskandariya–Alexandria