Forty Years Later, Who Reads Anthony Burgess?

 When I was much, much, much younger, Anthony Burgess was known for Clockwork Orange.

I do not think it is the best of the most famous dystopian novels; from what I have read about Burgess, it is not representative of his work. Right now, it strikes me as perhaps the most inventive in its language, and even its ideas. Aldous Huxley's prose in Brave New World is not so different from his other novels, and his world is a fair extension of his own world of English classes and British imperialism. 1984 is, likewise, Orwell pushing Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism to its limits. Ray Bradbury's flipping firemen from those who fight fire to those burning books in Fahrenheit 451 is an original idea.

I do not know who reads Burgess now, add him to the list of writers fashion and time has relegated to a corner. But The Literary Review released a review from 1985, The Kingdom of the Wicked by Anthony Burgess; Other Women by Lisa Alther by Kay Dick.

What one most admires in Anthony Burgess is the Balzacian creative energy and virtuosity which enables him to combine scholarship with imaginative fiction. His is a catholicity in the widest sense: his Catholic faith acts as inspiration and focus for dynamic achievement. Recently, writing about contemporary fiction, he regretted that themes and plots were, in the main, limited to the miniaturist canvas of personal relationships (which he cannot be accused of). Burgess thinks big and writes big: he thrashes his words into a gargantuan operatic ensemble of recitatives, arias and choruses. One is hardly surprised that he has composed three symphonies. Appositely perhaps that the second novel of this review should fall within the category of personal relationships rather contemptuously dismissed by Anthony Burgess. I shall come to that later.

The Kingdom of the Wicked, with all its bulk and ballast, is very much a drama of personal relationships, the historical content being Burgess’s orchestral accompaniment and scenery. Mr Burgess takes hold of an immense theme with magnificent mastery, controversially launching his drama with the enigma of the Resurrection, particularly topical an issue with the Bishop of Durham’s recent questioning. Mr Burgess, through his narrator, states his viewpoint very clearly: I will not accept miracles if the rational lies to hand, and I have no proof that Jesus died on the Cross.’ That is Mr Burgess’s initial bomb-shell, and he plunges us into the actuality of what followed, mainly through Paul’s pilgrimage and the roles enacted by Christ’s disciples (all splendidly differentially depicted). It is all here in this incredible story – fact fictionised as fact – almost ciné-verité. One hardly knows which mosaic to praise most, ones like the Jewish community, divided and at odds, themselves as bigoted and cruel as their Roman rulers, with their desperate deeds to preserve the purity of the true faith.

A Dead Man In Deptford is the other Burgess novel I read. It remains in my memory, not just for its subject, but for how it tells the story of Christopher Marlowe.

sch 5/23