Word: stacton
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...BALCONY (256 pp.)-David Stacton-London House & Maxwell...
Because the modern world tends to monotheism, the reign (circa 1375-1358 B.C.) of Pharaoh Ikhnaton is usually described in comparative-religion courses as a brief but glorious false dawn of theological enlightenment. Novelist Stacton will have none of this. In an astringent tale that examines men's motives and man's fate as closely-and coldly-as any historical novel in recent years, he presents his own view of the matter...
...true, Stacton writes, that Ikhnaton set aside the prevailing pantheism, in which the god Amon and Amon's priests ruled over a motley array of other deities. It is also true that the Pharaoh moved his capital downriver from Thebes to a new city built in honor of the new sun god Aton. But his actions had little to do with religion. They were the work of an inbred neurotic, a king of erratic, often clouded mind, whose strange, troubled life was set on its eccentric course by an obsessive fear of the dark...
Corrupt Priests. With care and cynicism, Author Stacton builds his theory. Egypt's priesthood, Ikhnaton's mother reflects at one point, was "a series of venal officials ... a branch of the police, and only slightly more corrupt." Yet she is well aware that "corruption is the price we have to pay for order." Her son might have realized it too, had he possessed only that measure of insanity normal to a bloodline transmitted for generations through the marriage of brother and sister. But when the priests of Amon, in the traditional coronation ceremony, pushed the new Pharaoh alone...
Folly's Power. Pharaoh's court inevitably degenerates; one of his weak, precocious daughters dies, and his beautiful sister-bride Nefertiti becomes half-blind with trachoma. By the gentle glowing phosphorescence of decay, Stacton's characters search for some meaning to life. Such a unicorn hunt cannot succeed, of course, but it has its impressive moments -Stacton's people talk very well. They may, in fact, talk a bit too well; after a time the author's fondness for epigrams becomes almost as irritating as Aldous Huxley's old weakness for brandishing his scientific...