The book begins with the Narrator living on a remote Greek island with Nessim's illegitimate daughter from Melissa (now either four or six years old – marking the time that has elapsed since the events of Justine); however the tone is very dark and opposed to the light and airy reminiscence of Prospero's Cell, Durrell's travelogue-memoir of his life on Corfu.

The prolonged nature-pieces, which are a highlight of Durrell's prose, still intervene between straight linear narrative – but are uniformly of askesis and alone-ness – and have a more pronounced "prose-painting" feel to them pre-figuring Clea.

Profligacy and sentimentality...killing love by taking things easy...sleeping out a chagrin...This was Alexandria, the unconsciously poetical mother-city exemplified in the names and faces which made up her history.

Tony Umbada, Baldassaro Trivizani, Claude Amaril, Paul Capodistria, Dmitri Randidi, Onouphrios Papas, Count Banubula, Jacques de Guery, Athena Trasha, Djamboulat Bey, Delphine de Francueil, General Cervoni, AhmedHassan Pacha, Pozzo di Borgo, Pierre Balbz, Gaston Phipps, Haddad Fahmy Amin, Mehmet Adm, Wilmot Pierrefeu, Toto de Brunel, Colonel Neguib, Dante Borromeo, Benedict Dangeau, Pia dei Tolomei, Gilda Ambron.This section is primarily related in Balthazar's voice, and is about the novelist Pursewarden, who is modelled on the British novelist Wyndham Lewis.

There is also the story of Scobie's demise: he had gone in drag to the harbour and is beaten to death by sailors, whom he might have tried to pick up, in one of the first depictions of a hate crime against a homosexual in modern British literature.

In the aftermath of his death the denizens of Scobie's quarter ransack his house, steal his meagre possessions and drink all the bootleg arak he has been distilling in his bathtub.

He leaves the term undefined, but the subjects he covers include prolonged affairs between the protagonists, mutual synchronous polygamy, homoeroticism and transvestitism, and psychological and actual sadomasochism.