Abel Is the Novel, Merlin Is The Firm

TUNC by Lawrence Durrell. 359 pages Dutton. $6.95.

Balthazar, second novel of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, begins portentously with these lines from De Sade's Justine: "The mirror sees the man as beautiful, the mirror loves the man; another mirror sees the man as frightful and hates him; and it is always the same being who produces the impressions."

In Tune, Durrell's first novel since the Quartet ended with Clea in 1960, a neurotic, solid-gold heiress with the heart of a prostitute streaks naked into her empty ballroom and shatters its mirrored walls with a repeating shotgun. This preposterous act suggests the syndrome of identity crisis and symbolic suicide encountered only too frequently in contemporary fiction. Mirrors and prisms are novelists' standard metaphors, and Durrell has always used them well. He does so again in this devilishly clever metaphysical mystery tale. But new times demand new metaphors; except for that brief, noisy episode in the ballroom, Tune is governed by a quavering image of the computer as truth giver. The hero, too, is brought up to date. The Alexandria Quartet was in large part about an artist's struggle for freedom within his culture; Tune, which in Latin means next," deals with the similar struggles of a scientist. Beneath its lush trappings and Mediterranean settings, the novel is basically a study of the ironies and ambiguities that result when a man tries to stand apart from society.

Thinking Weed. Durrell's representation of the cultural climate is Merlin otherwise known as The Firm, an international syndicate with tentacles in all the world's major markets. It is the embodiment of 20th century scientism, an emotionally neutral, self-perpetuating system of techniques that can be used for good or evil. Drawn into The Firm's cushy embrace is Inventor Felix Charlock, who sees himself as a "thinking weed," a pun on Pascal's definition of man as a "thinking reed." The Firm wants Charlock for his new recording device, which leads to the development of the ultimate computer, Abel. This electronic memory bank is capable of deducing an individual's past and future.

Durrell is necessarily muzzy on the technical details, though he seems to be securely wired into the arcane science of linguistics, games theory and McLuhanese. The point may be that Abel is the novel, both its medium and its message; according to one of the numerous minor characters Durrell keeps on tap to spout his epigrams, "The poetry is in the putty."

As the plot unfolds, Charlock marries Benedicta, the boss's daughter and the lady of the shotgun. Having become a key man in The Firm, with access to its inexhaustible assets, Charlock discovers the paradox of freedom: when all things are possible, nothing is possible. Denied the abrasive stimulation of uncertainty and risk, his creativity grows sluggish. A trip to the gambling tables owned by The Firm proves to be an exercise in boredom. Life for Charlock is reduced to a finite game that, like ticktacktoe, is impossible to lose once the rules have been learned.

At length, Charlock tumbles on an inexpensive way of turning a few cents worth of salt into a revolutionary washday product, and wants to donate the discovery to the betterment of mankind, but The Firm opposes him. His last attempt to exercise free will has been thwarted, and now he learns that his idea of freedom was illusory: he needed The Firm as much as it needed him. Charlock's most important discovery is that the slave is born with his chains. He retires to perfect Abel as an engine of revenge. There is a Hitchcock ending that is best left undisclosed.

Now or Never. Deep-dyed fatalism and the durable myth of Frankenstein surface from Durrell's dazzling assemblage. There are reams of the kind of beautiful travel and nature writing for which his Bitter Lemons, Prospero's Cell and Reflections on a Marine Venus have been praised. There are flashes of the ribald wit that makes his volumes about the British diplomatic corps such delights. But there is also much over writing. The book is littered with show-off phrases such as "alembicated piety" and "the penetralia of one's self-regard." The mixed metaphors are painful: "I lay on the slab, the mortuary slab of my immortal life--twitching like a skate in a frying pan." And the puns are leaden: a Rolls-Royce is a "flatus symbol," lovemaking is a "deathscapade," and a gourmet ponders whether there is "life beyond the gravy."

Yet all the annoying nits are brushed aside by Durrell's gaiety, originality, raw talent and rebellious exuberance. And there is more to come. Britain's Durrell, 56, who is currently visiting the U.S. for the first time, is already at work on a sequel, to be titled Numquam. "The whole is based on a passage from Petronius," he explains, "which talks about now or never, nunc ant numquam. In the old days, the passage says, the women would mess themselves up and go on top of the mountain and pray for rain, and believe in it, and say, 'Now or Never,' and the rain would come. In the modern age, we don't believe we can move Heaven any more." Durrell's hero learns how.

In California, Durrell was staying at the Pacific Palisades home of Novelist Henry Miller, an old friend and compulsive pen pal. Pursuing his investigations of Western culture, he played ping-pong with Miller and visited Disneyland, where he made three trips on the Mark Twain paddlewheeler and took the "Submarine Voyage." It may be that these adventures will find their way into Durrell's next novel: as a man and a writer, he has learned how to enjoy civilization and its discontents. Perhaps this is what Durrell suggested when he had his Felix Charlock declare: "We should tackle reality in a slightly joky way, otherwise we miss its point."

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