In Little Wilson and Big God (on p.416, to be precise) we discover that Burgess very much disliked the cover-art to this, his second novel. A Sikh, as portrayed here, would never work at a job so low-caste as pulling a rickshaw. 'The design on the dust-jacket showed a Sikh pulling a white man and woman in a jinrickshaw. I, who had always looked up to publishers, was discovering that they could be as inept as authors. The reviewers would blame me, not the cover-designer, for that blatant display of ignorance.' It's worth mentioning this, because it speaks to one of the grounds on which this novel is offered to its readers: as a portrait of late 1950s Malaysia to be judged by its verisimilitude. There are a couple of problems with this (setting aside my incompetence to judge the work on such terms, never myself having visited Malaysia). One is the extent to which it cuts across Burgess's grain as a writer: the Dickensian grotesque rendered with Joycean polyglot exuberance. Another is the texture of cultural inertia. An oddity of reading this 1958 second 'Malay Trilogy' novel in its 1981 omnibus edition (The Long Day Wanes) is the visible textual evidence of the novel's having been revised. Two quite distinct fonts (one fatter and broader than the other) comprise the text, presumably where the license of the 1980s enabled Burgess to revise the prose originally written for the more decorous 1950s. In the edition I read, for example, Abdul Kadir says 'for fuck's sake' a lot. Kadir is a teacher at the school in Dahaga to which Victor Crabbe has been transferred, after the events in Time for a Tiger, to work as headmaster; and the joke is that he has learned what he considers standard idiomatic English from sailors. Hence the swearing, which I'm guessing was hinted at rather than spelled out in the 1958 edition. There are presumably various other changes too, and the glaring difference in fonts is as distracting as if the old passages had been Tipp-Exed out and overwritten. History moves on, culture as well as the tabulation of specific events, and this is a novel that feels old-fashioned in a way not true of the first volume.
It's a less well achieved novel in several ways, I think. Two main storylines run in parallel, both focussed on ex-pats. In one our old friend Victor Crabbe and his wife arrive by plane in 'Dahaga' (Malay for 'thirst', according to Burgess's own glossary: this won't be the first time he falls foul of explaining his own jokes), which is based, apparently, on Kelantan. Fenella is furious with Crabbe because of the affair he had back in Kuala Hantu. Crabbe tries, in a desultory manner, to run his school. He has another affair, this time with the (White) wife of the colonial State Education Officer, one Anne Talbot. Fenella's blondness is coveted by the Abang, the notional ruler, and she either has an affair with him, or else just sits with him talking about things, I'm not sure it's spelled out. They grow apart, do Crabbe and his wife; and in one sense the business of the novel as a whole is tracing the final decline of their marriage. It ends as the two of them, more exhausted than angry, agree to separate.
The second main plot strand concerns one of Crabbe's old University friends, a struggling young lawyer called Rupert Hardman. He is an ex-RAF fighter pilot, whose face, burned when his plane crashed, has been reassembled by surgeons. Strapped for cash, he marries a wealthy local woman called Che Normah, even though he has to convert to Islam in order to do so, and thus upset the local whisky priest Father Laforgue. Hardman is of course miserable in his new married state: hen-pecked by his wife (a two-times widow concerning whom dark rumours circulate), he ends the novel undertaking the Haj to Mecca with is wife, but only in order to abandon her at Aden and slink home. He's a fairly weaselly character, is Hardman; and his main contribution to the very loosely orchestrated plot is to let slip, at a party, that when he knew him at Uni Crabbe had been a Communist. An ambitious Malay teacher at the school called Jaganathan, who resents having been passed over for the Headship by the appointment of Crabbe, uses this nugget of information to try and oust his rival (any perceived sympathy for the Communist rebels, hiding in the jungle, being deadly to his reputation, not to mention illegal). Coincidentally as this is happening, Crabbe discovers that his Chinese cook has been sending food and supplies (from Crabbe's kitchen) to these same rebels, not because he is committed to the Communist cause, but merely because one of the rebels is a son-in-law of his, and to an Easterner family trumps everything. Crabbe cannot persuade the old man of the wrongness of his actions: 'it was,' Burgess the narrator notes, 'genuine innocence, the most dangerous thing in the world' [317]. Crabbe can't go to the police without incriminating himself, since it was his food that was being delivered to the terrorists.
This storyline, though, goes nowhere very much. There's a slightly under-inflated comic set-piece late in the novel, where certain Sikhs come to Crabbe's house to try and sell him some furniture and discover the old Chinese cook arguing with the young Malay housemaid. The actual cause of the quarrel is a cat, which the cook plans on eating, and for which the maid has tender feelings. The cook tries to explain, but language difficulties hamper him and Kartar Singh misunderstands.
'Makan' has too many meanings. It primarily means to eat, but it is often used of the action of the cock and the hen, the bull and the cow, superogatory in a language rich in motor and sensory terms. Kartar Singh, his one rare day of imagination not yet set, took this secondary meaning. He forgot that the Malays revere cats and that the Chinese merely relish them. [327]Outraged at what they perceive to be the old man's goatish designs on the girl's virginity they threaten him with 'little axes', the often invoked (in this novel) Malay threat of violence. Scared, the old man runs off to join his son-in-law in the jungle, and so Crabbe's difficult position solves itself.
Otherwise there are various minor characters of Malay, Chinese, Sikh, Hindu and Catholic varieties. There's a great deal of food described and eaten. The novel's title, an Englishing of the Malay phrase musuh dalam selimut, refers to being betrayed by somebody with whom one is intimate. In Time for a Tiger it is used to describe one of the boy's at Crabbe's old school who was a fifth columnist for the Communist rebels, and there's a sense of that in this novel too, although the Communists are all off-stage and never generate any effective tension or threat in the textual world of the story. The second meaning is sexual: there are three female characters here, Che Normah, Anne Talbot and Fenella. All three are situated in terms of their sexual relations (the first with Hardman, the second with Crabbe and a handsome young officer called Bannon-Fraser, and the third with Crabbe and the Abang). All three are more or less tigerish, in the sense that they refuse to sacrifice their agency to the men in their lives; and I suppose this tiger-heart-wrapped-in-a-woman's-hide aspect of the novel is a notch above simply libelling the women as shrewish or nagging—though they do nag, and they are pretty shrewish.
The Enemy in the Blanket is a messy novel, in both good and bad ways. The good is Burgess's full-on embrace of an aesthetics of sprawl, a cornucopean attempt to cram much muchness into his fiction. It works here because the world he is describing is a crowded and untidy one: the Malaysia of AB's trilogy, as is true of (people say; I have no personal knowledge) actual Malaysia, is a messily multi-racial polygot, sweaty, bustling land. Burgess reproduces this formally by leaping grasshopper-wise from point-of-view to point-of-view, Malay, Chinese, Sikh, White, French-Catholic and so on. And he reproduces it stylistically by the distinctive Burgessese, the luscious joy with which everything, ripe and rotten, beautiful and seedy, is rendered into prose. That's all fine. He does less well with his plot, which comes over as inconsequential. More debilitating for the whole is his failure, mood-wise, to create any sense of dread, excitement or anticipation -- this last a real problem, since the whole trilogy is centrally 'about' a large-scale sense of looking forward, the Old Colonial way dead and gone, the new Independent Malaysia in the offing. He's good on languor, and heat; good on anger and frustration; less good on sex (what a deeply unerotic novel this book is to be sure).
My first thought was that this was one of the themes of the novel: that countries, especially multi-racial countries, just are messy places, and that monolithic procrustean 'clean' ideologies and worldviews make no headway there. Written down like that, it looks rather feeble. And thinking again I'm less sure. I find myself wondering if something else isn't at work here.
Late on in The Rhetoric of Fiction (that arthritic old warhorse of liberal-humanist literary criticism) Wayne C. Booth quotes novelist Herbert Gold:
The writer needs a causal connection with his society, some sense that his work does something to make everybody's privacy a privilege rather than a burden.That's a striking thought. The tension between the novel's duty to expose vice and the danger of its violating privacy, perhaps degrading the very idea of privacy, is an old one, and I don't have space to rehearse it here. What's relevant to The Enemy in the Blanket is the way it portrays secrecy as simply untenable. The priest, with his inviolable confessional, is literally chased out of the country. Every secret every character possesses comes to light: Crabbe's infidelities; his Communist past; Hardman's ulterior motives; Fenella and Anne's hidden desires. In part this is the logic of living in a village of course; but Burgess seems to be making a larger point about the East itself as a place in which privacy doesn't really apply. Hardman thinks his conversion to Islam a pretext to marry his rich widow and free himself from money worries; he discovers to his chagrin that, amongst other things, it licences the Ramadan police to arrest and fine him for smoking and drinking during the hours of daylight. At one point the Abang ponders the logic of George Orwell's dystopia:
The Abang had read George Orwell and was struck by the exquisite appropriateness of the title of the Ruler of Oceania ...(This is because 'Abang' literally means 'elder brother')
.... It had amused him for a time to consider sticking posters throughout Dahaga, posters bearing below the image of his own powerful head the legend SI-ABANG MEMANDANG AWAK. But it was doubtful if his Malay subjects would have seen the point. All right, he was watching them. Why was he watching them? Did he admire their beauty, or something? If he was watching them, they could equally well be watching him. Where was all this watching getting anyone? What was there to watch anyway? [303]This, Burgess says, is Malaysia. It's also the Novel, as a form. Insofar as it is developed further it seems to be in the direction that European marriages can't survive this level of unprivacy. As Eliot's bird might have said, human kind cannot bear very much transparency.
I wonder if this is the fault line that vitiates the novel for me, though. Maybe the problem is Crabbe, or rather Crabbe's centrality to this narrative. Into him Burgess tries to decant some measure of dignity, even objectivity: and with him he hopes (to look ahead to the final volume of the trilogy for a moment) to construe a little tragedy. AB is always doing this. Part of him is 'Anthony': most certainly Anthony rather than Tony (can you imagine 'Tony Burgess'? I shudder at the very thought): patrician and haughty, for whom love and social life add up to tragedy as it did for Shakespeare's Anthony. But part of him, the larger part, and the part more in tune with his genius, is Burgess: common and a little vulgar, capacious and spacious and sprawling, gossipy and unafraid of exhibitionism. Burgess is East, in his ravenous appetite for food and drink and company, the unprivate man. Take as counterpoint this quotation by Thoreau's Natural History of Massachusetts:
When I detect a beauty in any of the recesses of nature, I am reminded, by the serene and retired spirit in which it requires to be contemplated, of the inexpressible privacy of a life,—how silent and unambitious it is.It's rather beautiful, that; and we can think of writers who devote their careers to dramatising and exploring its point of view. Something of AB, the tragic, elevated, confessional-box Catholic Anthony, the Anthony who resented fame and the Nanny State, might even nod his head sagely at it. But it is one hundred and eighty degrees away from what Burgess achieves in is art. Can you think of three adjectives less descriptive of Burgess at his greatest than 'serene', 'silent' and 'unambitious'? This novel comes alive when it is most fully Burgess; those places where Anthony pokes in (where Crabbe awake in the night beside his sleeping wife, listens to the surf of the South China Sea under the moonlight and ponders with tenderness how he has not been a good enough husband) chime a cracked bell sound. Private moments, and private lives, are not the AB forte. And to be fair, in the next volume, Beds in the East, Burgess lets the slack out a touch with a little self-parody: Crabbe in an airport lounge, 'suddenly he saw all this [his situation] as romantic—the last legionary, his aloneness, the lost cause, really lost—and instinctively he pulled in his paunch' [425]. Still Beds moves with Antonine tragic seriousness towards Crabbe's fatal denouement. Which is probably a good moment to turn to the third volume in the trilogy.
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