Cabal & Kaleidoscope

BALTHAZAR (250 pp.)--Lawrence Dur--rell--Duifon ($3.50).

This important new novel, second of a projected group of four, carries forward perhaps the most exhaustive study of love since Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. In the first volume, Justine (TIME, Aug. 26, 1957), Author Durrell, 46, brilliantly evoked the city of Alexandria, which has festered for 2,000 years between the sun-sparkling Mediterranean and the Egyptian desert. Balthazar covers the same terrain and time span as the first. It is as if the reader were making a return train journey through a landscape he had just crossed--only now he is sitting on the opposite side of the car and everything looks different.

Again the novel's narrator is Darley, a seedy, itinerant Irish schoolteacher. Again the plot concerns his sexual and soulful involvements with Justine, a feline Egyptian Jewess; Nessim, her millionaire husband; Melissa, a tubercular Greek dancer. There is also an assortment of other exotics, who seem to have crawled from beneath a blistered and immemorial stone of Alexandria--Scobie, the transvestite policeman; Toto de Brunei, who dies with a hatpin rammed through his brain; Capodistria, the goatish sybarite; hare-lipped Narouz, who carries a severed head in his saddlebag; Pursewarden, who has discovered "the uselessness of having opinions" and turns to the humdrum world "the sort of smile which might have hardened on the face of a dead baby."

Space & Time. In Justine, Narrator Darley drew what he thought were final conclusions from his own experience: he supplied answers as he saw them to Justine's nymphomania, Nessim's seeming complaisance and incipient madness, Melissa's tortured love. In Balthazar, an all-seeing, cabalistic doctor gives a rude shake to this picture and, as in a kaleidoscope, all the parts fall into radically changed patterns. Darley learns that Justine only pretended to love him, that he was used as a decoy to conceal her passion for

Pursewarden, who might thereby escape Nessim's slow-burning revenge. Darley would willingly have died at Justine's command, but Pursewarden, her real love, considers Justine merely "a tiresome old sexual turnstile through which presumably we must all pass."

As Proust used the theories of Philosopher (and Nobel Prizewinner) Henri Bergson in his titanic effort to write the definitive novel of time and memory, so Durrell seeks to base his four-decker work on Einstein's space-time continuum. Justine, Balthazar, and the projected third book, Mountolive, will "interlap, interweave, in a purely spatial relation. Time is stayed. The fourth part alone will represent time and be a true sequel."

Truth & Sensuality. Has Durrell succeeded in his effort to discover a new "unity" for fiction? He has, to the degree that few readers can be indifferent to his work or unaware that they are encountering a formidable talent. But, as was the case with Proust and Joyce, his greatest impact may be on other writers--who have become increasingly dismayed at the possibility of finding anything to say in the "realistic" novel that has not already been said better by Tolstoy. Dostoevsky, Melville, Thackeray, Balzac.

Balthazar, like Justine, is written in a hauntingly sensual style. Over all, like a mirage, hangs the image of Alexandria, where "flocks of spiring pigeons glittered like confetti as they turned their wings to the light." Like confetti glitter Author Durrell's more memorable lines. Justine raised many questions that Balthazar answers. Balthazar has its own riddles, which presumably will be solved in the forthcoming Mountolive. But one overriding question is certain to sound throughout all four volumes: What is truth? To that, Durrell has already made a typically cabalistic reply: "Truth is what most contradicts itself."

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