Tunc

Tunc is really only half a novel, since Durrell had planned throughout to continue and conclude it in Nunquam, and there is nothing like a conclusion evident in the first book. Still, it's a pretty good half-novel as I rank them. The style is very 20th-century modern, perhaps midway between Malcolm Lowry and Thomas Pynchon, complete with the latter's tendency to interject funny songs and verse. Protagonist-narrator Felix Charnock is an inventor whose fortunes become embedded in the multinational firm of Merlin Industries. He has gone to ground in Athens after a circuit that began there, led him to Istanbul and thence to London. His original technological forte is audio recording, but during his late time at the firm he has applied show more himself to the extracurricular development of Abel, a computer dedicated to the purpose of divination on the basis of recorded speech and other data. Tunc is a retrospective exercise, just as Abel is coming fully on-line. Charnock reflects on his friends, lovers, and professional associates since the days of his independence in Athens, charting out a wide-flung web of psychological manipulation and frustrated desires.

The book and its sequel are together titled The Revolt of Aphrodite. I'll take a breather before reading Nunquam, but it's firmly on my list to be read. show less

You don't read LD for the plot or the complicated story line. Its all about character and his command of the English language and use of English words that are no longer part of the American idiom.
20 or so years of Felix Charlock's life are spent in thee pages. What read somewhat like a Paris Hemingway novel transposed to Athens with Brits and Greeks evolved into the navel gazing of the scientists life for "The Firm" and a very poor marriage. He finally is disgusted enough to leave and engage with his teenage son but this leaves to a failed assassination attempt that takes the life of his son. Interesting but not uplifting. LD has other better books.

Compared to the masterful treatment of timing, and point of view in the "Alexandria Quartet, this two book series "The Revolt of Aphrodite", seemed quite flat and uninteresting. Neither the artificial woman, "Aphrodite" nor Merlin, her creator, seem...well, finished, in any sense, and the future world is barely sketched in. I finished it out of gratitude for the Quartet.

Read for the Reading Through Time Group's October 2015 theme, Science & Technology
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Lawrence Durrell's Tunc fits broadly within that theme. It's actually a dystopian novel (the first in the Revolt of Aphrodite dyad), dealing with an inventor who is seduced into contracting his life away to "the firm," which is a bit like my memory of Kafka's Castle, incomprehensible and inescapable.

The second book of the dyad, Nunquam, as I understand it, may be a bit of a Stepford Wives kind of production. I'll probably try to get to it in the next week or two, just for the sake of completeness.

I read these two novels (along with the Alexandria Quartet and The Dark Labyrinth back in the mid-70s, for a graduate course on the Modern British Novel show more taught by Neil Brennan at Villanova University. I quite liked The Dark Labyrinth (which seemed a bit of a take on Dante's Inferno and Purgatorio) but didn't care for either of the dyad or the quartet. I still haven't changed my mind, but I'll still give Tunc 3½*** for being a book that you should like ... well, if it's the kind of book you'd like. show less

> Babelio : https://www.babelio.com/livres/Durrell-Tunc/93833

> La langue est superbe et un roman de science-fiction bourré de citations latines et de références à l'antiquité, n'est certes pas chose courante.
—Danieljean (Babelio)