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

Commonweal, Feb 11, 1994 by Suzanne Keen

Some readers have found Earthly Powers wearying--my father, for instance, can't get through it. Burgess's fictional output was so various and so plentiful that a reader who is irritated by the metafictional riddling of MF (1971) might still be delighted by the Enderby books (1963, 1968). The evocation of a not-so-distant lost world (the silent movies, popular songs, and favorite foods) in The Pianoplayers (1986) may appeal, though the speculations about Shakespeare's love-life and career appall, or vice versa. Reading around in Burgess is rewarding and often surprising. One of his most hilarious characters, the race-relations researcher Mr. Raj, transforms an otherwise unremarkable book about wife-swapping, The Right to an Answer (1960).

Since Burgess's vocabulary, his love of odd words, old words, off-the-beaten-track words, his fascination with foreign tongues, etymologies, and dialects, has the effect of encrusting his fiction with a scumbled surface of language, my own favorites tend to be those novels that can support and justify this layer of discourse. His novels about writers, real or invented, such as A Dead Man in Deptford (Marlowe), Nothing Like the Sun (Shakespeare), Abba Abba (Keats), the Enderby books (about a fictional poet), and Earthly Powers (Toomey, the writer of potboilers), make good vehicles for the Burgess lexicon. Certain pet words in that well-used and ever-burgeoning collection reveal Burgess's obsession with the body. To some extent he simply follows his master Joyce here, in representing the physicality of his fictional creatures. Yet he can hardly write a book without "emetic," "costive," "engorged," or "eructation." A concordance would embarrass not for what his characters' bodies do, but in what terms.

Repetition of material, from the level of the habitually used word, or irresistible epigram, or quick characterization, to the level of situations, events, and authorial hobbyhorses was Burgess's greatest weakness. When the repetition works within a novel as part of a "musical" structure, it is a desirable part of form. But in the realm of content, repetitions seem lazy. How many female characters can demonstrate their slovenliness by picking their teeth with tram tickets before the reader wonders whether a different bad habit might do the trick as well? To learn the autobiographical source of the detail (in this case, Burgess's loathsome stepmother) makes the repetition appear compulsive.

Burgess was brave to have published his autobiographies, for he tempts his reader to see the thinly-disguised as merely thin, in some cases. And yet he lived such a fascinating life that even his worst autobiographical books (such as Beard's Roman Women, 1976) have interesting features. He made excellent use in his fiction of a life that took him from Manchester to Gibraltar to Malaya to Borneo, from England to the United States to Malta, Italy, Monaco, and Switzerland. It is difficult to place Burgess the novelist on the map of contemporary fiction--he moves around so much! This novelist, critic, composer, traveler, amateur linguist, teacher, citizen of the twentieth century possessed "a kind of catholic quality" in the breadth and inclusiveness of his interests. Burgess's books were written, he said, "not merely to earn bread and gin but out of a conviction that the manipulation of language to the end of pleasing and enlightening is not to be despised." He made a modest claim for a monumental career.