What Book to Read?

Ask most people to name a book by Anthony Burgess and they’ll say The Clockwork Orange – and they’ve often only heard of that because of the disturbingly violent film Stanley Kubrick made of it in 1971. The question posed by both the book and the film is whether society should use aversion therapy to stop a person’s anti-social violence – in other words, whether people should be free to choose between good and evil. Burgess repudiated the book, saying it was ‘the raw material for a film which seemed to glorify sex and violence …. I should not have written the book because of this danger of misinterpretation’. If you do read The Clockwork Orange, remember that Burgess disowned it.

If you’re interested in the question of people’s freedom to choose either good or evil, you’d do much better to read his novel Earthly Powers (1980). This is a huge book, dealing with many of the main events of the twentieth century, but a persistent theme is the issue of choice and its consequences – often unintended.

The story is narrated by Ken Toomey, who at the beginning of the book is in his eighty second year. For most of the eight two chapters, he recounts the events of his life, so that the novel is actually a series of linked stories. Toomey is an English popular novelist and playwright, now living abroad, who has known many of the leading literary intellectuals of the century (Ernest Hemmingway, Hermann Hesse, and James Joyce to mention just a few). He has observed the First World War, the rise of Mussolini and Hitler, the Second World War, and a good deal else besides. He has struggled with his homosexuality and his Roman Catholic upbringing. He views the world with a wry cynicism – but can never escape from the pull of ‘that terrible emotive trinity’ – duty, faith and home.

I very much enjoy the way Burgess, in writing the ‘autobiography’ of Toomey the writer, frequently makes the reader do a double take on the issue of authorship. For example, Toomey consistently belittles his talent. Burgess, speaking as Toomey, comes up with a stunning opening sentence: ‘It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.’ But then Toomey explains it away by reference to his ‘old cunning in the contrivance of what is known as an arresting opening’. This is in fact the cunning of Burgess; he has contrived an arresting opening, all the more so since his comment makes sure the reader notices it. Even Toomey’s penchant for mentioning the famous people he has known is a device by which Burgess mocks the affectation of writers of autobiographies. Burgess makes one of Toomey’s characters says that everyone in his, ie Toomey’s, novel is fake – and so of course is Toomey. Burgess plays this game very subtly and amusingly.

Burgess suggests in the way he links the episodes of Toomey’s life, particularly those involving his friend Carlo Campanati, that if there is a pattern to things, it is a malign one. Choice has unintended consequences; actions intended as good turn out to have terrible results. And how far were the choices free? At the end of the book Toomey asks: ‘Had I been free?’ And concludes: ‘Not for one solitary moment of my life had I been free.’ For all Toomey’s cleverness and sophistication, and all the humour Burgess injects into the story, this makes the view of life expressed in the book quite pessimistic. Still, Toomey has survived to a ripe old age, and is rewarded by Burgess with a ‘happy’ ending, though Toomey (or is it Burgess?) notes that endings always were one of his weaknesses.

Aside from The Clockwork Orange, which put me off Burgess for years, this is the only one of his books I’ve read. I understand that his work is notoriously uneven, so if you want to read something by him, make it this one.

A much fuller review of Earthly Powers can be found here.