ANTHONY BURGESS

Taking another novelist to write about may not seem the most logical thing to do at this juncture, but I have to confess to a begrudging admiration for Anthony Burgess, whose End of the World News was one of the most fascinating and innovative novels I have ever had the privilege to read, a novel divided, as I recall, into three parts, or 'books', juxtaposed in an overlapping fragmented arrangement (undoubtedly decadent) that encourages one to follow three stories simultaneously, the main story, viz. End of the World News, concerning the destruction of the world by and through cosmic mishap, an unusual and perhaps understandable variation on the theme of global holocaust, which documents the gradual approach through the Galaxy of 'Lynx', a foreign planet destined for collision with the Earth, and telling of the desperate attempts by various people to escape from the doomed world by spacecraft; while the other two stories deal with Trotsky and Freud respectively - the one a dramatised version of Trotsky in New York before the Bolshevik Revolution, the other a more or less complete biographical sketch of Freud that highlights, in particular, his life in Vienna during the early years of the Third Reich.

Here, then, is a bourgeois revolutionary, a novelist or, rather, antinovelist who presents us with an unprecedented combination of facts and fictions, and all in consummate style. Indeed, so radical is his departure from the previous novel, the epic Earthly Powers, that an analogy with James Joyce comes to mind, and one is tempted to think that Anthony Burgess consciously planned to emulate Joyce by following what will probably be regarded, in years to come, as his literary masterpiece with a more radical and complex work paralleling, in some degree, Joyce's progression from Ulysses to Finnegans Wake. And one is tempted to think this all the more doggedly in view of their author's well-known admiration of and professional insights into the works, especially the above-mentioned ones, of the great Irish expatriate. No less than they come at the climax to Joyce's career, it seems feasible to contend that Earthly Powers and End of the World News mark the climax to the career of Anthony Burgess.

But analogies with Joyce can be misleading, particularly in the private sphere, since whereas the Irishman rejected Catholicism and preferred secular freedom on the Continent to theocratic bondage in Ireland, the Briton of predominantly Irish extraction is an avowed Catholic for whom, as with Graham Greene, consolations of the Faith are as yeast to his work.