Word: stacton
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...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...
...mystique of power. The ironic Artist Tutmose-whose hauntingly beautiful head of Nefertiti is on view in West Berlin's Dahlem Museum-solves only part of the puzzle when, near the book's end, he concludes that "beyond our own motives, existence has no reason." Perhaps, Stacton seems to be saying, the puzzle of existence constitutes its own reason...
...Balcony is the second of a set of three novels by 34-year-old Author Stacton, an American who was born in Nevada and now travels widely. His first novel, Remember Me, about the mad Ludwig II of Bavaria, was published in England, where it won critical acclaim. Most readers of the current novel will eagerly await the third, to be published in the U.S. later this month. Entitled Segaki, it concerns a 14th century Japanese monk and his search for wisdom...