The Wanting Seed (1962)

This is the first Burgess title I've read on this chronological go-through that seems to me really not to work. I'm not saying it's a bad book. It's readable, some of the set-pieces are very well handled, and the whole is thought provoking. But nonetheless, there's something in the machinery of the book that grinds, or catches, and the result halts and groans, somehow. Put it this way: there is a genuinely interesting conceit, or rather a schematic theory of history, behind this book. The problem is that Burgess does a rather intermittent job of realising this theory in a coherent dramatic-narrative structure.

The setting is the near-future dystopia of a massively overpopulated world, freed from war by a quasi-sovietised autocratic state. The world groans under the bulk mass of humanity. London stretches from the south coat to Norwich and as far west as Bristol. Food is synthetic, unappetising and in short supply; global resources are depleted and now mass-die-offs are killing all the fish. In a prescient anticipation of China's 'one child policy' (not adopted until 1979; in the 60s Mao was still exhorting Chinese citizens to have as many children as possible), Burgess posits a strict law limiting couples to a single child, with severe penalities for the over-fecund. The state also encourages individuals to sterilise themselves, and homosexuality is actively encouraged, to the point where heterosexual people suffer social stigma and some pretend to be gay in order to advance their careers. Our hero, Tristram Foxe, is passed over for promotion because he is straight, and because his family has a history of over-breeding. He is bitter at this, and gets drunk. Meanwhile his wife, Beatrice-Joanna Foxe, is having an affair with Tristram's brother Derek, a ruthless individual who is passing as gay in order to improve his prospects for promotion.

First, then, the theory. It's symptomatic of the novel's approach to its Big Theme that Burgess sets the story going with a schoolteacher literally lecturing bored schoolkids about the specifics of the Big Theme. In SF nowadays we call this kind of thing 'infodumping'. Tristram Foxe is the schoolteacher, named presumably for a Holy-Grail-Restore-Life-To-The-Wasted-Land Arthurian associations of the Christian name, and perhaps nodding at 16th-century priest John Foxe, of Foxe's Martyrs fame, who became a Protestant in part out of opposition to the principle of clerical celibacy (he described this in letters to his friends as 'self-castration'). It's a little unclear how far Tristram is teaching official ideology, and how much is his own idiosyncratic view on the matter: there is a mile-high statue overlooking the English channel, of Pealgius, or Augustine, depending, which suggests the former. At any rate, Tristram tells his kids that history is cyclical, characterised by three phases: Pelphase, Interphase, and Gusphase. Pelphase is so-called after Pelagius, who believed in the intrinsic goodness of human beings. Condemned as a heretic by Augustine, Pelagius is taken by Burgess to be the representative figure for all social philosophies predicated upon the perfectibility of humankind, of which socialism and Communism are (he implies) the latest. 'Pelagius' means 'from the sea', and there's a great wash of sea imagery and seaside scenes in the novel. Tristram says: 'a government functioning in its Pelagian phase commits itself to the belief that man is perfectible, that perfection can be achieved by his own efforts, and that the journey towards perfection is along a straight road." Gusphase is Augustinian and predicated upon the belief in the innate wickedness of human beings, conceptualised by many in terms of original sin. Men must be restrained, punished and given particular structures to live. The 'interphase' is the time of transition from one to the other: a time of excessive brutality, police torture and savagery, social chaos and violence. The novel opens in Pelphase but is more concerned, really, with Interphase: ('"Brutality!" cried Tristram. The class was at last interested. "Beatings-up. Secret police. Torture in brightly lighted cellars. Condemnation without trial. Finger-nails pulled out with pincers. The rack. The cold-water treatment. The gouging out of eyes. The firing squad in the cold dawn".')

So far so stiff: as grand theories of history go, it's not the most convincing I've ever heard. What lifts it out of mere artificiality is the motor of change that Burgess proposes: they are the dialectically connected forces of disappointment on the one hand, and on the other its antonym, being-pleasantly-surprised (is there a single word with that precise meaning in English?). According to Tristram, the problem with 'Pelphase' is precisely that people believe humanity to be better than it is, and so are continually being disappointed. This, rather than the sheer pressure of overpopulation and environmental degradation, is what propels the breakdown. Conversely, what brings 'Gusphase' to an end is exactly the opposite of this: people assume human beings are so deeply sinful and wicked, they end up being repeatedly surprised by how much better they actually are. This, I think, is interesting: I'm not sure I know of another book that treats disappointment as having such world-changing power. Yet there's something insightful and true about this: disappointment is surely a much more potent force in the world than is generally understood. We are less troubled by bad behaviour, even quite severe delinquency, from people of whom we expect nothing better; and often disproportionately troubled by more trivial transgressions by people of whom we had high hopes. Burgess's originality is in imagining this as a social as well as an individual phenomenon.

There are problems, though. The novel is caught uneasily between on the one hand a (by 1962, standard in SF) doomsday narrative of society collapsing under the weight of overpopulation, and on the other a more abstracted sense that society will collapse because of the structural forces of disappointment tipping Pelphase into Interphase. It's hard to shake the sense that overpopulation, here, is supererogatory to the social breakdown Burgess wants to delineate; although I suppose we could instead say that that breakdown (the main 'event' of the book) is, as the phrase goes, over-determined. Things in life often are. More worrying, perhaps, is the sense that the paraphernalia of state oppression, police torture and so on, are features only of the Interphase; the Pelphase has almost no need for police, it seems (hard to believe, but there you go) and the Gusphase is only sketched-in. In neither of those cases did I believe it.

Then there's the story Burgess sets out to tell. As with many of his early novels, this is disposed, like an Elizabethan drama, into five acts. The first, 'Part One', sets-up the world summarised in my second paragraph, up there. Tristram and Beatrice-Joanna have already had their one permitted child. He died an infant. We see their misery, and understand that Beatrice-Joanna's affair with Derek is in part reaction to this. Then we get four more-or-less disconnected novella-length episodes.

Act 2: Beatrice-Joanna discovers she is pregnant, probably via Derek. Since this puts her in contravention of the law she leaves her husband and flees the city to stay with her sister in the countryside. Meanwhile the interphase is beginning: Tristram is caught up in a riot and, though blameless, is locked up in prison. He appeals to his brother (now high up in the government) to have him released, threatening to reveal him as a heterosexual and the father of an illicit child to boot if he doesn't; but Derek coldly decides his brother will be less bother safely behind bars.

Act 3: society descends to chaos, vividly rendered in terms of mass sex-orgies and cannibalism. Beatrice-Joanna gives birth, and names the baby Derek. Tristram eventually escapes from prison. In Act 4: Tristram tramps across interphase England, eating where he can, trying to make his way back to his wife. He ends up in Preston, where he goes for food at 'WD North-West District Communal Feeding Centre' This, though, is a front for forced conscription into the army.

Finally we get to Act 5, the strangest of the novel. Tristram, pressed into military service, He's barrelled through basic training, shipped overseas with a great quantity of comrades to face 'the enemy', the identity of whom, along with the casus belli, are never disclosed ('"But who is this damned enemy?" asked Sergeant Lightbody for the thousandth time' [168]). They land somewhere, perhaps Ireland, march across country and enter a large building that looks like a country house on the outside, but which on the inside is only a 'mere shell, like something from a film set'. It's dark. The sound effects of guns and shells firing are played on loud-speakers; fireworks and other visual effects are occasionally played. There is a short, fierce battle in which everybody (except Tristram) is killed. The novel reveals what the reader has suspected for twenty-pages or so: the whole thing has been staged, two halves of the same army destroying one another to reduce overpopulation, and perhaps also to blow off interphase steam and lower to incidence of violence more generally. It is called an 'ES', or 'Extermination Session'. It's implied the dead bodies are recycled as a proto-Soylent-Green. (Indeed, in You've Had Your Time, Burgess flat-out accuses Harry Harrison of plagiary) In an epilogue, Tristram gets away and returns to the mainland finally meeting his wife again in Brighton.

There are various ways in which Burgess's colonial experiences, and his canny eye for the state of the nation, served him well as a novelist. He saw clearly and early, for instance, that the UK was becoming the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural place it is today. But he handles this matter better in other novels. For instance, one of the joys of The Doctor is Sick is how diverse are the ethnicities and nationalities of the people Spindrift encounters, differences Burgess captures via astutely observed reproduction of their modes of speech. The Wanting Seed can't do this, since part of the scattershot satirical point of the novel has to do with the crushing homogoneity of the socialist state. Instead Burgess gives us a cartoonish set of visual descriptions: 'Miss Herschhorn, a Teutonico-Chinese ... with dog's eyes and very lank, straight black hair' [8]; 'a boy of purplish Dravidian colouring with strong Red Indian features' [14]; 'a handsome Nigerian girl' [19]; 'a waiter came, black as the ace of spades in a cream jacket' [59] and so on. The three main characters are White, of course; and the extent to which the novel ostentatiously notices racial difference only when it is non-White speaks to a problematic.

There's a similar difficulty with the novel's handling of homosexuality. The premise is quite a sharp one, with its inversion of the bias against same-sex desire (I wonder if Joe Haldeman read this novel prior to writing The Forever War ...); and Burgess gets credit for including homosexuality in his fiction more broadly. Many of his novels have gay characters in them, from Time for a Tiger through to the splendid Earthly Powers. Who amongst his contemporaries was even doing this? (Are there any gay characters at all in Graham Greene, for instance? In 1960s-era Doris Lessing? In David Lodge or John Fowles? Are there any in Golding except that leering predatory schoolmaster character in the early bit of Darkness Visible?) And the satire of The Wanting Seed is not premised on the inherent absurdity of a world in which homosexuality is valorised and heterosexual fecundity stigmatised: not at all. Burgess understands that beyond a certain point fertility is blight, and he introduces several fundamentalist Christian background characters in order not-so-subtly to mock their be-fruitful-and-multiply beliefs. The Bible (banned in Burgess's future) is 'an old religious book full of smut. The big sin is to waste your seed, and if God loves you He fills your house with kids' [37]. Still: one might wish that Burgess's gay characters weren't so bottom-wigglingly, preeningly camp all the time, so ghastlily true to homophobic caricaturing form. A lesbian couple kissing in an elevator are 'classically complementary—fluffy kitten answered stocky bullfrog' [9]. A 'steatopygous young man' in a 'flowery round-necked shirt' uses the elevator mirror 'to make up his face, simpering, as his lips kissed the lipstick' before 'undulating' off [10]. By the time you meet Tristram's colleagues (one has 'a mincing, niggling voice .. a whiff of perfume and two sets of twittering lashes' [52]) it dawns on you that Burgess hasn't the first clue about how actual gay people live and are. Without, quite, advancing a homophobic agenda he nevertheless shares the common homophobic misapprehension that a gay man is necessarily effeminate, that homosexual desire somehow 'unmans' a man. Derek, Tristram's brother, is repeatedly described as mincing: 'He minced' [39]; 'Oh, Tristram,' minced Derek, alveolizing the name to an insincere caress' [40]. Engrave it in tablets of brass and set them over the writer's working desk: the number of times you should use the word 'mincing' to describe a gay character is: zero—assuming, of course, that you want your gay characters to come across as real people, and not caricatures from a 1975 Two Ronnies sketch.

But perhaps the small-scale 21st-century-reader's disappointment in this connects, in some way, with the book's Big Idea about disappointment as a driver of historical change. I'm put in mind of Martin Amis's rearguard defence of Larkin's sexism, racism and so on ('Is there any good reason why we cannot extend our multi-cultural generosity to include another dimension? That of time. The past, too, is another country. Its ghosts may look strange and frightening and slightly misshapen in body and mind, but all the more reason then, to welcome them to our shores'). The real problem with The Wanting Seed is not its heart-in-the-right-place clumsinesses (never amounting, I think, to active malfeasance) as far as representing sexual and racial diversity as social facts is concerned. The problem is one of two incompatible novels forced together: a good brisk novel about a heavily overpopulated world reacting with social pressure via a "Make Room! Make Room!" avant la lettre big reveal at the end; and a thesis about cultural history as alternating from Pel- to Gus-phases that not only doesn't need the overpopulation premise to operate, actually tangles in destructive and confusing ways with it.