Desire for Desire

NUNQUAM by Lawrence Durrell. 318 pages. E.P. Dutton. $7.95.

An Irishman raised in India, Lawrence Durrell is a kind of blarney artist in swami's turban. In The Alexandria Quartet, the illusions were so masterly as to seem substance enough. In Tune, Durrell's 1968 novel, and now in its sequel, Nunquam, Durrell's virtuosity has slipped sufficiently to leave him exposed as a bit of a trickster. His hand is no longer quicker than the reader's eye, and many critics have clobbered him.

Nunquam is no Justine, but it is better than its detractors are saying. Like Novelist Frame, he too seems more concerned with what will be than what has been. Certainly, his plot is stock Brave New World. Julian, the boss of a sinister superorganization known only as "the firm," orders up a sex-goddess robot modeled after a dead movie star, lolanthe, whom he once loved. Due to circumstances that occurred in another time and another place, Julian is a eunuch, empty of everything but the desire for desire--what Durrell calls "the enormous cupidity of impotence." Once constructed, lolanthe II defeats him. With her warm nylon skin and electronic memory-bank brain, she behaves more humanly than he does, thinks more briskly than he can. In the end, eunuch and robot, in mutual exasperation, fall to their death in each other's embrace, like lovers in an old-fashioned melodrama.

The trouble is that the whole plot seems to have been programmed by one of Julian's own computers, with Author Durrell more intent on manipulating his symbols than exploring his characters.

Still, if one can take Nunquam as a sideshow, the minor Durrell delights are there. Who else would write, "The cinema is the No play of the Yes-Man"? And where else, in the year 1970, is there a novelist inclined to describe the aftereffects of a concussion as "darkness hanging like a Japanese print of an extinct volcano"?

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