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LIVIA, OR BURIED ALIVE by Lawrence Durrell Viking; 265 pages; $10.95
Lawrence Durrell has written a duet of novels (Tune and Nunquam) and The Alexandria Quartet. Now he is literally trying to go himself one better. Livia is a mirror image and extension of Monsieur (1975), and Durrell has promised that three more novels in this series will follow.
Such structural underpinning helps the writer more than the reader. For all his fascination with the theories of Einstein and Freud, with the fragmenting of personality and time, Durrell fortunately remains a devotee of Scheherazade. Livia stands comfortably on its own as a polished romance filled with bright, interesting characters. They gather in the 1930s at Avignon, home of the medieval and mysterious Knights Templars. The air is "full of the scent of lemons and mandarines and honeysuckle" and of something else: dread of the future that Hitler is planning across the border in Germany. Durrell is still prone to overripe passages, but some of his audacious effects work memorably. He describes the madam of a French brothel sitting in her establishment, "enthroned in wigged splendour like a very very old ice cream of a deposed empress." At its frequent best, Livia offers a world of cool, dark enchantment.
BROCA'S BRAIN by Carl Sagan Random House; 347 pages; $12.95
From the title essay, which deals with the discovery of 19th century Brain Researcher Paul Broca's own brain in a formaldehyde-filled jar in a Paris museum, to his final speculation on out-of-body experiences and life after death, Carl Sagan (The Dragons of Eden) again balances technical expertise with humanistic thinking. The astronomer is not always successful, as when he tries to relate the psychology of the Big Bang to the experience of birth. But he is unassailable on subjects of pure science: the awesome structure of a grain of salt; the strange, hospitable atmosphere of Titan, a moon of Saturn. Sagan is at his wittiest when he attacks his bêtes noires: the ideas of Catastrophist Immanuel Velikovsky. Scientists usually lapse into tantrums when they discuss Velikovsky's belief in Venus as the cause of Old Testament miracles and plagues. Sagan, in a chapter worth the price of the book, refutes the claim so calmly and effectively that the theory, like an exhausted Sky lab, falls of its own weight.
A YEAR OR SO WITH EDGAR by George V. Higgins Harper & Row; 250 pages; $9.95
Peter Quinn is a successful Washington lawyer who hates himself for the compromises made on the climb upward. Edgar Lannin is a cynical Boston-based newsman whose life revolves around alimony payments and self-inflicted assaults on his liver. Friends since their college days at Fordham, the conflicted personnel of George Higgins' newest novel do not really go any place between the book's first page and its last. But the two, who consume enough alcohol to drown W.C. Fields, manage to talk a good life. Their conversations, about sex and the lack of it, marriage, divorce and children, and Roman Catholic angst, ring as true as quarters on a bartop.