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

Commonweal, Feb 11, 1994 by Suzanne Keen

Books discussed

in this essay

Abba Abba, Faber, 127 pp. (out of print).

Beard's Roman Women, McGraw Hill, 155 pp. (out of print).

A Clockwork Orange, Norton, $7.95, 188 pp.

A Dead Man in Deptford, Hutchinson, not available in U.S.

Earthly Powers, Carroll and Graf, $15.95, 608

Little Wilson and Big God: The First Part of the Confessions, Grove-Atlantic. $14.95, 460 pp.

The Long Day Wanes: A Malayan

Trilogy, Norton, $10.95, 512 pp.

Man of Nazareth, McGraw Hill 357 pp. (out of print).

MF, Knopf, 242 pp. (out of print).

Nothing Like the Sun, Norton, $9.95, 240 pp.

One Hand Clapping, Knopf, 216 pp. (out of print).

The Pianoplayers, Pocket Books, $4.95

ReJoyce, Norton, $8.95, 276 pp.

The Right to an Answer, Norton, $3.95, 255 pp.

The Wanting Seed, Norton, $9.95, 288 pp.

You've Had Your Time: The Second Part of the Confessions, Grove Atlantic, $23.50, 403 pp.

In addition to Anthony Burgess's fiction and autobiographies, t have drawn on a 1981 interview with Samuel Coale (Modern Fiction Studies. 27:3. 429-452). I am indebted in my discussion of the Pelagian, Augustinian. and Manichaean in Burgess to the work of John J. Stinson (Anthony Burgess Revisited, Twayne, 1991) and Geoffrey Aggeler (Anthony Burgess: The Artist as Novelist. University of Alabama Press, 1979).

Suzanne Keen's critical essay on Anthony Burgess is another in our series of articles on contemporary Catholic writers of fiction. We have asked our essayists to give an overview of the author's work, showing our readers where and how this writer locates the central human drama, the big questions, the religious crisis of our time. What does the Catholic sensibility of Anthony Burgess tell us about our common world, about the state of our souls? The most recently published article in the series was written by James Finn on Robert Stone (November 5, 1993).

SUZANNE KEEN, a frequent Commonweal contributor, teaches English at Yale University.