Books: Mad Pharaoh

ON A BALCONY (256 pp.)—David Stacton—London House & Maxwell ($3.50).

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.

It is 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 into the pitch-dark holy of holies and touched him with the dry hands of a jointed wooden idol, the royal mind snapped.

Ikhnaton never entered a temple of Amon again. Turning against the priests, he withdrew their profitable monopoly in the Nubian gold fields and won powerful support by giving it to the army. With the help of a minor priest, he invented a sun-drenched theology based on the insignificant deity Aton, built a new city, Aketaten, and chiseled the name of Amon from every temple in the land.

Since courtiers must have a court, the nobility followed Ikhnaton to the half-finished city and mumbled nimbly when priests chanted new hymns. But however fervent the chanting and however often the courtiers assured Pharaoh that he would not die (death was expunged in the new theology), Aton worship was never more than a plaything, tolerated because it kept Ikhnaton from more destructive games.

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 erudition. “The one thing wisdom does foolishly,” Stacton chisels in the enduring wood pulp, “is to overlook the power of folly.” And “though women, like cats, enjoy boredom and derive great strength from it, men do not.”

The author’s delight in being oracular does not detract much from a clever investigation into mysticism and the 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.

On a 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.