Spineless Reviews

Earthy prowess

Earthly Powers, by Anthony Burgess

£6.99, Vintage (2004)

The Toomey family and its spouses span the two worlds of secular and spiritual entertainment: the former popular, and the latter trying to be more so under the auspices of the new pope and brother-in-law to narrator Kenneth Toomey. Over eighty years Ken tries to hold the family together, popularize highbrow writing (or more often vice versa) and hide his homosexuality from the disapproving authorities and his more disapproving relatives. Meanwhile Don Carlo barges his way through the echelons of the Roman Catholic Church. The one, blighted along many of with his comrades-in-art by what he considers to be original sin; the other, comprehending the sinner, but unwilling to denounce that doctrine which draws most criticism to him and his allies.

Captured by the novel at the end of his life, the narrator and confirmed atheist must reconcile his own beliefs with undeniable miracles performed by Carlo, whom the Roman Catholic Church would see beatified if only the testimony of a confirmed non-believer could strengthen their cause. We find Burgess in these semi-autobiographical waters, sometimes treading, sometimes swimming powerfully (against currents to which lesser writers might yield), and sometimes splashing around in a fug, making you wonder why he doesn’t towel himself off and go and do something else.

Ominously, the book starts slowly and painfully. These birth pangs lower Toomey/Burgess’ prose to the level of the amateur writer: awkward phrasing, overintellectual posturing and excessive descriptions imply a difficult time ahead. But the rambling tale quickly warms up, and after a few chapters is striding through history, directing its players like chess pieces, making inscrutable moves that plan in irony for a plot (historical or often pseudo-historical) twist some ten years distant.

The appearance of several members of the entre deux guerres literati will yield either wicked grins or pained cringes, according to taste: although most will baulk at the forced (and forcedly ironic) chumminess in calling the century’s most astonishing writer “Jim Joyce”, the dirty truth about what George Russell was really doing on Bloomsday more than compensates for such aesthetic agonies. Certainly this novel weaves a dazzling history out of disparate and unlikely materials, although one must then contend with the entanglement of fictional and apocryphal threads in the weft.

Ultimately the story suffers from its length (a thick wodge reminiscent of doorstop thrillers), becoming meandering and losing its climax in a huddle of successive denouements. This doesn’t harm the pull of its yarn, but the ante has been raised and we expect more from Burgess of all people. Still, there are treasures to be unearthed here, rich parodies and pastiches of the literary and the decidedly unliterary—the lyrics to the musical rendition of Ulysses being a case in point—and multilingual jokes that work even for the monoglot.

Here is a story, then, that can be enjoyed on a casual reading, and has much for the more circumspect; but the murky, peaty depths stop too soon, too abruptly. In a book about a writer, written by the writer’s writer, this is as disconcerting as a swimming pool four foot shallower than advertised. But if not having the heart to compose a great, “high-art” acrostic—as the protagonist could not bring himself to do either—is a sin that only our mate Jim was ever able to resist, and then only one and a half times, then it can hardly be considered an original one.

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Comynycacyon betwyxt Burgess, and our sauyour Jhesu

Little Wilson and Big God, by Anthony Burgess

£8.99, Penguin (1988)

The autobiography of someone so prolific and polymathic as Burgess inevitably carries with it heavy baggage, a retinue of expectations and assumptions and questions that must be answered. From his very first disclaimer, though, Burgess both shifts the ground away from his ego and towards his experiences and history, and at the same time assures us that this will be no whitewash. If this is to be a redrafting at the hands of Memory—inevitable, and announced as such, following the destruction of most of his papers at the hands of Malaysian termites—then there will be no clear intent to sanctify the author.

Every wart on Anthony Burgess’ head has been counted. Most of them by the man himself, and some fifty percent of those in the first half of his autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God. Generous with the reader and cynical of his own literati excesses, Burgess is loveable from the first flash of his wicked humour. He’s a self-acknowledged fudger, if not exactly an outright fraud, but he can both acknowledge it and get over his Catholic guilt at the fact. The master skimmer, faker in part, wins in the end because of the knowledge, wit and research—let’s refrain from using the word “genius”—that he needn’t fake: his intellectual laziness and intellectual robustness together making him so exciting and infuriating.

We follow Burgess through his troubled paternal relationship, terminated in his childhood, and his experiences at the hands of his step-family. He makes it to university, but is hardly the model pupil. Arguably his extracurricular interests save him as a human being and, spurred on by the alternatives—a teacher in the army and at a school, and various jobs in the colonies—and the sudden appearance of serious illness, his hubris, life history and willingness to just sit and write set him on the career path we now know him to have chosen.

All the time we are conscious of Burgess analysing himself, prising open old wounds for us to see, ashamed but not faltering in the task of the biographer who, even if the subject is himself, and for all his desire to paint for posterity, respects the audience he expects for his book just enough to be honest. Even if you allow for the shameless polyamory of his marital life (on both sides), he treated his wife shabbily, neglect which he clearly believed led to her eventual descent into alcoholism and death from a liver complaint. Here is no saint, no god, no perfect writing machine.

You can argue, as Roger Lewis does in his recent biography of Burgess, that such disingenuousness is bluff and counterbluff ad nauseam. That is not the point. Nor is it the point that Lewis’ work is mean-spirited, poorly researched or simply untrue, although it is. The plain fact is that Burgess writes well: he engages, he mocks, his turns of phrase are not so elegant as to be stylized, nor so clumsy as to be gauche. Such writing sits on solid foundations of artistry, skill, knowledge and learning. Lewis might want to stop crying naked! at the knowingly unclothed emperor and learn a thing or—maybe, just maybe, if he concentrates very hard—even two.

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Non-stop press

Urgent Copy, by Anthony Burgess

OOP, Penguin (1973)

To review reviews might be said to be compounding the mistakes that someone else made perfectly well for themselves. But Urgent Copy is worth reading, and arguably worth writing about. Burgess wrote for many reasons. He wrote for fun; he wrote for profit. He wrote to settle scores, and he wrote with the urgency of a man condemned by doctors to die. Most importantly and proverbially, though, he wrote and wrote and wrote. It must have been easy to skim off the cream and package it as this volume.

Burgess proceeds from his fields of expertise and deep interest (Nabokov, Beckett) through standard literary-rag fare (Shakespeare, Milton) arriving quite happily and breezily in landscapes he himself is clearly only just discovering (the brothers Grimm and Walter Bagehot—there: a review of a review of reviews). Not to worry, though: like Bertrand Russell, Burgess will happily cover acres of ground that we could never cover for ourselves; as with Russell, we must inevitably discover the hidden snares for ourselves.

What stands out are his reviews of stinkers. As he says in his preface, he is always willing to give his fellow trench-diggers the benefit of the doubt. So when Williams’ Modern Tragedy “makes tragedy a very tragic business”, the understatement (which elsewhere seems a little overindulgent) is as damning as a personal slur. But above all Burgess’ writing shines with a rhetorical and intellectual clarity, that some mistake for a pretence to rigid, studious integrity. Despite the huge body of work he has left behind in the field of criticism and analysis—only a slice of it exhumed in Urgent Copy—he was above all a complicated mix of author and journalist. At his worst, he is eminently readable. At his best, he’s a joy.

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The land of the setting sun

The Long Day Wanes, by Anthony Burgess

OOP, Penguin (1981)

The British empire is on the retreat. Finally accepting that the complexity of Eastern society is a puzzle they will never solve, the massed ranks of Western officialdom are starting to pull up sticks and book their flights home. Victor Crabbe, and his eventual acquaintances Nabby Adams and Rupert Hardman are in the process of becoming anachronisms; although Crabbe is the only one to fully perceive it, he nonetheless clings the most doggedly to the evolving Malayan state. While the Malays, Tamils, Chinese and Muslims perform a vicious dance together, of accusations, fights and simmering revolution, Crabbe is hoping he can stay on long enough to help the indigenous peoples solve that puzzle for themselves. But how can Crabbe save the remnants of bureaucracy that might help to bring forth a nascent Malaya, when he has trouble saving his own career, marriage or sobriety? Through education, and a national symphony…?

Much is autobiographical about Burgess’ sprawling cycle of books, originally published as A Malayan Trilogy. Burgess was a teacher; he spent a lot of his life in the east; his marriage had its ups and downs, and his first wife her alcoholic, dissipated spells. Indeed, much of the colour of this book is clearly first-hand: vivid, although with an inevitable touch of colonialism, it brings all the characters fully, utterly to life. Many of them are at least in part stereotypes of their race, but in the volatile environment of the Malayan peninsula at that time it’s easy to believe that people would return to the values of the cultures they grew up with, entrenching racial divides at the expense of national unity. Moreover, in every case the stereotype typically forms only a tiny fraction of each portrait, like a vague political allegiance rather than the main drive of the personality. Burgess has developed the individuality of each person to the point where it completely swamps the moulds that originally formed their shapes: the inscrutable Chinese are either Britain-spoiled chortling aesthetes or confused, hair-tearing adolescent geniuses; the devout Muslims all take part in haram to varying extents, sometimes partying and mingling with the British; they in turn are neurotic and tortured, or gushing and well-meaning, scarcely ever bluff or stiffened of upper lip.

Such depth of character is very much welcome, because the plot of the trilogy might as well not be there. Events just sort of happen to people, and any attempt to take matters into their own hands leads them more often then not to minor perditions. It might be said that, certainly for Crabbe, external politics move him from place to place and advance the book, but one feels that the precise opposite happening would, as far as Burgess is concerned, suit the course of the novels just as well. It’s this pointlessness, this lack of a teleology, that makes the books so convincingly realistic. A polemic, or a more surgical dissection of the mistakes and bad judgment that took part in the formation of the Federation of Malaya, might have served Burgess’ cause more fully, but it’s not entirely clear what he was pursuing with these novels (if anything more than his own career). However you interpret his political stance and the success of its communication, though, there’s no doubting that he brings a transitional, forgotten world to life; if the remnants of the empire include the humanity of Crabbe and others, then it cannot have wholly failed.

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