“No longer a hotel”

The chapter explores the colonial hotels of Egypt suggesting that they accommodate the double allegiance of the protagonists in Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960, 1962). Durrell’s hotels progressively become metaphors for the disintegration of the imperial apparatus. The decadent aesthetics, with which colonial hotels are imbued, register this potential. The reading of Durrell’s neo-decadent tropes is in line with recent repositionings of literary representations of Egypt within the expanding scope of the orientalist decadent canon. The exaggerated appropriation of the decadent mode in Durrell’s tetralogy finds culmination in the cosmopolitan hotels of Alexandria and Cairo ending up as waste spaces of the empire.