The first of Burgess's 'return to England' novels (1959-69), and the first of the half-dozen (or so) that he wrote in short order, believing himself to be dying and wanting to provide for his wife. It's also, much as I enjoyed all three Malayan novels, the first Burgess title that really strikes me as fully accomplished: technically extremely well handled, readable, evocative, believable, thought-provoking. I like its boldness in building the whole around so frankly unlikeable a central character as J.W. Denham, our narrator: a crusty early-middle-age businessman who works overseas, but who returns several times over the course of the novel to the English Midlands, where his elderly father is (first) unwell, and (then) dying. J.W. ('John Wilson', you see) is part of the reason why the book has the word 'Right' in its title. He is reactionary and Conservative, thinks the world is going to hell, is fond of lecturing others on their failings and immoralities, with a particular bee in his bonnet about adultery. Here are the novel's opening four sentences:
I'm telling this story mainly for my own benefit. I want to clarify in my mind the nature of the mess that so many people seem to be in nowadays. I lack the mental equipment and the training and the terminology to say whether the mess is social or religious or moral, but the mess is certainly there, certainly in England and probably in the Celtic fringe and all over Europe and the Americas too. I'm in a position to smell the putridity of the mess more than those who have never really expatriated from it -- the good little people who, with their television, strikes, football pools and Daily Mirror, have everything they want except death -- because I only spend about four months in England every two years now, and I get the stench sharp in my nostrils (widened by warm air) as soon as I land and for about six months after that. [1]'It's a mess,' he thinks, 'that's made by having too much freedom.' Observing the British Empire dismantling itself around him, he styles himself 'amused' to see 'citizens of newly independent territories scampering off to places still groaning under the British yoke. They don't want freedom; they want stability. And you can't have both.' [3]
So far so Blimpish. But the novel very quickly, mercifully, climbs out of this procrustean ideologising. By the end, looking back over what he has written, Denham has changed his mind. 'I wondered now if that sin against stability was really the big sin.' He adds:
What I did realise quite clearly was the little I'd helped, the blundering or not-wishing-to-be-involved plump moneyed man on leave inveighing against sins he wasn't in the position even to commit ... [for] adultery implied marriage and was perhaps a nobler word than fornication or masturbation or -- never mind.' [252-3].Denham is our point-of-view observer of 1960-flavour provincial Midlands life, centering on close-horizons, a hypocritical suburban respectability behind which people commit adultery, golf playing retirees, restless youth, and everybody congregating the local pub. Much of the novel is set in the pub, and much of what Denham does is: drink. A secondary character is Ted Arden, the landlord of the Black Swan pub. The photographic negative Shakesperianism of this inn's name is a deliberate move, for Arden is actually descended from the Bard's mother's family. Uneducated, large and friendly, Arden presides over a pub that is represented in the novel as a de facto sanctified place. The narrator, invited by Arden to stay behind after closing time and buy everyone a round, puts it nicely:
It is recognised in England that home drinking is no real pleasure. We pray in a church and booze in a pub: profoundly sacerdotal at heart, we need a host in both places to preside over us. In Catholic churches as in continental bars the host is there all the time. But the Church of England kicked out the Real Presence and the licensing law gave the landlord a terrible sacramental power. Ted was giving me grace of his free will, holding back closing—which is death—making a lordly grant of extra time. [18]HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME indeed. A spear-carrier character is the local vicar, who peppers his speech with many 'bloody's and some other mild profanities. He offends the proprieties of a visiting Sri Lankan Mr Raj by so doing. Burgess is making a Catholic point here: this Protestant priest no longer has access to the healing true blood; all he has is words. Farre gone, farre gone: What do you reade my Lord? Words, words, words. Yes, Hamlet is one of the intertexts here, too. We'll come to that in a minute.
First we have to talk about Mr. Raj, arguably the novel's central character. He attaches himself to Denham during the latter's stint in 'Ceylon', as it used to be called, and he politely but tenaciously refuses to be shaken off. Dark-skinned, intelligent, ingenuous, handsome, charmingly persistent, Raj travels back to England with Denham, ostensibly to undertake university research on 'racialism', but in fact to broaden his experience of life. The plane flight over 'was the time for Mr Raj to talk of his abundant sexual experience ... sparing me no details sounding the gamut from twelve-year-old Tamil girls to Parsee matrons of fifty.' Still, he envies Denham: '"you have been with European women and I have not. That," he said, as we sped west, "is something for me to look forward to." "I know nothing of English women," I said, "nothing at all." [81] In England Mr Raj is angry that the only accommodation offered to him is located 'low streets where West Indian negroes brawl and carouse in lodgings' [106], and insinuates himself into Denham's father's house. This old feller, casually racist after the manner of his class and generation, is won over by the tasty curries Raj cooks for him and accepts him into his home. Indeed Raj handles the general racism he encounters, from impolite words in the Black Swan to physical attacks by Teddy Boys, with an aplomb and dignity only partly compromised by his own racism (negroes he asserts several times being 'an inferior race').
Mr Raj is a curious creation. He quickly comes to dominate the novel into which he has been introduced, and Burgess's creation of him falls into that debatable land somewhere between well-observed vitality on the one hand, and on the other Peter Sellers in The Millionairess wearing brownface make-up. I suppose it is to Burgess's credit that he tackles this straight on. Because whatever else it is, The Right to an Answer is a latter day Condition-of-England novel, and in a central way Burgess is spot-on that that condition, from the 1960s onwards, was one of trying to come to terms with two new major social forces: sexual liberation on the one hand and our new multi-cultural kaleidoscope ethnic identity on the other. Mr Raj falls in love with an Englishwoman, Alice, whose husband (a printer called Winterbottom) has run off to London with a younger woman, in part to pay Alice back for cheating on him with her tennis partner. Denham himself is posted to Tokyo, where he takes a Japanese mistress called Michiko. But the novel, having spent most of its length on comic dialogue and set-pieces, turns its last act to a slightly muted tragic conclusion: Michiko is raped by some G.I.s, the first iteration of a recurring trope in Burgess's writing whereby he works through, by fictionalising it, the assault his wife Lynne suffered at the hands of G.I.s during the war. She leaves Denham, just as he receives news that his father is dying. He flies straight home, but arrives to find that he is dead. Mr Raj (instead of calling professional help) brought in some Indian friends who inadvertently hastened the old man's end. Mr Raj, meanwhile, has been driven to a jealous rage by finding Alice in bed with another man—in fact her own husband, who had returned to her, partly prompted by Denham in London. Mr Raj shoots this fellow dead, and then takes his own life. Denham returns to Japan to write his account.
Burgess is, frankly, better at his dark comedy than at his light tragedy. And this brings us to the novel's Shakespearean associations. I'm less sure what to make of these, actually. During the after hours lock-ins at the Black Swan, descriptions of which punctuate the narrative, Ted Arden is fond of bringing down his two collections: one of his father's old guns, the other of his old books (it is from the former collection that Mr. Raj obtains the pistol with which the tragic denouement is enacted). At the end of the penultimate chapter, one of these latter is discovered to be a hitherto unknown early Quarto printing of Hamlet ('horrible wood type on sick crinkled yellow paper' [244]; consulting it Denham finds a mangled version of 'To Be or Not To Be', so it's a Bad Quarto). Selling this brings Ted Arden great wealth. Later, on a world tour with his wife, Arden visits Denham in his Tokyo office and relates a family story, apparently passed down through the generations of Ardens, about Shakespeare: how he left his wife because he fell in love with 'a black woman', the Sonnets' dark lady, we presume. 'This black woman of is ad come on a boat from Africa. Well up in the world she was, daughter of a chief or something, and she wasn't made into a slave but was taken into somebody's ouse and made a lady of. And this poor bugger fell for er, ook, line and sinker' [250]. Arden glosses this with some of-its-period sexual orientalising ('Ive eard about these black women .. once you ave one yer dont want anybody else'), and insists that Shakespeare caught syphilis from her, which explains the 'quite mad' later plays, and which eventually killed him.
Burgess puts this theory centre stage in 1964's Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare's Love Life, as well as his 1970 critical study of Shakespeare, and it seems in the (now-lost) screenplay he wrote for a proposed Shakespeare biopic too. It occupies a peculiar place in this novel, though. For one thing, it has the slightly ostentatious prestidigitatorial flourish of an author revealing the key to his work: for the answer to The Right to an Answer, or one answer to it, is that it is a novelised modern Shakespearian Problem Play. The book's 20 chapters break into five groups of four, Act breaks being signaled by Denbham leaving the Shakespearian Midlands. Act 2 (chapters 5-8) is about Denham travelling to Sri Lanka, coaching a new company man in situ, and meeting Mr Raj. In Chapter 9 he returns to England (it opens: 'my father had aged more than my month's absence') and Act 3 is mostly about Mr Raj's installing himself in English life. It closes with Denham on a ship travelling to take up his new Japanese posting Act 4 is all travel, west to east and then back again: chapter 13 in Singapore, 14 Japan, 15 (after Denham gets news his father is dying) in a plane travelling back, with some excellent comedy concerning a Bardot-ish French film star also travelling, and 16 back in England. The final act brings in the bodies, and the pay-off. We realise that we've been reading a riff upon Othello, with some Hamletian touches added in. 'You were jealous,' Denham tells Mr. Raj, as the two of them stand over Winterbottom's corpse. 'Jealous, and perhaps puritanically disgusted' [231]. Raj doesn't deny it.
This works well-enough, once we see that Burgess's main point has to do with translating the more elevated Shakespearian idioms into a ruthlessly observed demotic-banal. There are no princes; the whole dramatis personae is rude mechanicals, and their speech is very sharply captured by Burgess's acute ear for the specificities of accent, idiom and the rhythms of actual talk. There's even an ambiguity to the tragic ending. The police come to arrest Mr Raj, in the bedroom where the corpse of Winterbottom is still in bed, and he takes Denham's advice: 'he put the neat lady's pistol to his right temple and squeezed the trigger with a delicate milk-chocolate finger. Just before he did it, he winked at me with his left eye, as though the whole thing were a joke, really; which, for a Hindu, perhaps it was.' Denham's judgment is not a charitable one. He sums up all the goings-on as lacking, precisely, elevation: 'there's been nothing like that about any of them, nothing heroic or leander-like, just silly vulgar people uncovering the high explosive that lies hidden underneath stability' [233].
Nevertheless, Denham the narrator hands over the last word to Mr Raj, quoting one of his earlier letters for nearly two pages. And even that sour summing up is leavened by the way it falls, seemingly naturally, into Shakespearian pentameters, or approximations thereof (a trick Burgess works repeatedly into the novel, actually):
Nothing like that about any of them,Nor is it empty game playing, or mere formalism, this particular intertextuality. It's Denham, and Burgess, groping towards a way of talking about the whole British imperial adventure. The Englishman (women have little to contribute to The Right To An Answer, alas) who is drawn by the exotic, who sees Africa, or the East, as a women and travels out to fuck her. Like Burgess himself (Andrew Biswell insists in The Real Life of Anthony Burgess that Denham is actually just a mouthpiece for the echt Burgess; we can take that with a pinch of salt) Denham is strangely proud that, though he has made love to women all over the world, he has never bedded an Englishwoman. Arden is genealogically a descendant of Shakespearian stock, but the English as a whole, Burgess is saying, are all sons of Will, drawn to dark ladies, problematically mixing our comedy and our tragedy. This is a very good novel indeed.
Nothing heroic or leander-like,
Just silly vulgar people ...
Uncovering the high explosive that
Lies hidden underneath stability
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