Son of the Sun

By J. S.

A GOD AGAINST THE GODS

by ALLEN DRURY 310 pages. Doubleday. $10.

Fourteen centuries before Christ, the mystical pharaoh Akhenaten tried to sweep away the ancient pantheon of gods worshiped in Egypt. To replace the gods, he devised a kind of monotheism. Since monotheism is the modern preference, Akhenaten is now considered to have been one of civilization's heroes. But at the time his religion was very bad politics. Akhenaten failed; the ancient gods won: The surprise is not that Allen Drury, the Advise and Consent man, has written a book about Akhenaten--a pyramid could be made of books about him and his queen Nefertiti--but that his viewpoint is political.

It is no secret that Drury is not much of a novelist. This time he advances his narration by bringing his characters onstage alone to soliloquize about what has occurred and what bad results may be expected. Occasional modernisms ("A cheap shot," "Say the magic word," "I had gotten through to him") clink absurdly, and it is hard, when they do, to imagine the pharaoh's golden barge ghosting through chill nights on the Nile. Yet a patient reader is rewarded by some provocative notions about Akhenaten and his cousin-wife Nefertiti. the royal beauty whose sculpted head is, after the Sphinx, the best-known work of Egyptian art.

Drury assumes that a power struggle seethed between the pharaohs of the 18th dynasty and the priesthood of Amen, the most powerful of the gods. Amenhotep III, an easygoing, able administrator, failed to move firmly against the priests. When his son Amenhotep IV finally did strike at the priests, it was with a hysteria that unsettled courtiers and populace. Yet it was this man, a neurotic genius with a face and body distorted by what seems to have been a severe hormonal imbalance, who declared the Aten, the disc of the sun, to be the one true god. Then he closed the temples of Amen, built a new capital dedicated to the Aten and took for himself the name Akhenaten, "the son of the sun."

No Heirs. The author judges these events with the professionalism of an old Washington political writer and finds that the pharaoh neglected to mend his fences. He inherited enormous popularity but wasted it in extravagance and flabby foreign policy, not to mention a gaudy love affair with his younger brother Smenkhkara. Queen Nefertiti produced two daughters but no male heir, and her subsequent fall from favor cut the ruler off from what Drury assumes to have been her steadying influence. Akhenaten mated with several of his daughters in an effort to sire an heir. These dynastic couplings resulted only in a succession of stillborn female infants. Meantime, the priests of Amen continued to frighten the people expertly. By the novel's end Akhenaten has not actually reached his downfall. A sequel is promised, however, and things look dark for the son of the sun.

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