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.