Ironies and inversions: the art of Anthony Burgess - Cover Story

Commonweal, Feb 11, 1994 by Suzanne Keen

The fundamental article of Burgess's faith is that free will defines humanity (in this he resembles Pelagians), so he represents the curtailment of choices as fundamentally wrong. In A Clockwork Orange, Burgess reprehends behaviorist conditioning (the delinquent narrator is compelled to watch films of atrocities after receiving a drug that induces nausea), for its infringement of free will. The once ultra-violent Alex can no longer react with the badness of the self, which was made by "Bog or God." Ultimately Alex is deprogrammed, so that he may enjoy music and elect to kick, murder, and rape again. Whether Alex could ever choose to be good depends on which version of the novel you read. For the American edition, the last chapter was chopped off; Burgess explains that the structure of the book, in three sections of seven chapters, adds up to twenty-one, the traditional number of maturity. With only twenty, you miss Alex "renouncing violence as a childish toy." Even without the ending, however, Burgess makes it plain in A Clockwork Orange that goodness is no virtue if it has not been chosen and that the state's attempt to eliminate evil is an assault on the self.

One of Burgess's very best novels, Earthly Powers (1980), takes up the Augustinian/Pelagian antithesis in a richer, fuller fiction. It brings together two characters, the narrator, Kenneth Toomey (a homosexual novelist, loosely based on W. Somerset Maugham), and his brother-in-law the pope, Carlo Campanati (loosely based on, and attacking, Pope John XXIII). The novel unfolds retrospectively as Toomey recounts in more than replete detail the events (personal, familial, literary, and world-historical) that lead to his giving of testimony regarding Don Carlo's miraculous healing of a child. Toomey, a popular writer and a rationalist, is exiled from the church because, as he sees it, God made him a homosexual. Ironically, he is the self-appointed Augustinian of the book, while the Holy Father Don Carlo seeks to advance the Pelagian cause through ecumenicism. The evidence suggests that Don Carlo is not a saint, but an agent of the devil. Toomey discovers that the child cured by Carlo grows up to be a Jim Jones-type, who massacres his misguided followers (including two of Toomey's relatives) in a eucharist of cyanide.

Carlo's attempt to reunify Christianity leads to another grisly communion, in which two more of Toomey's young relatives are eaten by cannibals at their celebration of the Eucharist. With mass suicide on one end and cannibalism on the other, the fruits of Pelagianism are realized in a sacrament that has become diabolical. Here Burgess's taste for ironies and inversion leads him once again to the Manichaean conclusion. Yet the author is more sly than this summary suggests; since readers derive their information from Toomey's colorful, exaggerated, and consciously crafted reminiscences, they may suspect that they are dealing with that modern creature, the unreliable narrator. Despite the implausibility, the conceit of a single mind encompassing the experience of modernity works because Toomey's recollection is broadly inclusive. He spills forth theological disputations, popular song lyrics, descriptions of his sister's fashionable outfits, and perfectly reproduced repartee from decades past. In Earthly Powers the imaginary and the incredible come together in a fabulous book.