Alexandria: In Which the Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin and Sabine Unfolds

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Alexandria is the second volume in Nick Bantock’s Morning Star
trilogy. Like its predecessor, The Gryphon (2001), it is epistolary in
style and intensely visual. Bantock was an illustrator before becoming a
writer, and his love of the graphic arts is evident in the beautiful
representations of postcards and letters (which must be removed from
bound-in envelopes). The book is full of fantasy: postage stamps and
postmarks, whimsical animal portraiture, human figures cloaked in East
Asian costume—to turn pages is to embark on sensual adventures. While
the book is nominally an exchange of correspondence between
Alexandria-based Egyptologist Matthew Sedon and his Parisian lover,
Isabella de Reim, simmering beneath these letters and cards are the
undercurrents of the mysterious Sabine Strohem and Griffin Moss, the two
principals of Bantock’s hugely (both commercially and critically)
successful first trilogy, Griffin and Sabine. While Matthew and Isabella
carry on their epistolary love affair, their words and even their lives
are informed by directives given by their counterparts Griffin and
Sabine. The symbiosis of the two relationships—Griffin with Isabella,
Sabine with Matthew—at times Jungian in its archetypical nuances, is
one of the threads of the novel. “Isabella,” writes Matthew,
“I’ve always had a sense that there’s another voice deep inside me
who is wiser than I am—someone who instinctively understood way more
than I even could.”

Bantock has said in interviews that he believes that readers who surf
the Web are accustomed to textual material heavily punctuated with
graphics. It is this audience that will doubtless get the most pleasure
from Alexandria. But most readers will be stimulated by its beauties.