Anthony Burgess, "Puma" (2018)

 This new Burgess science-fiction novel is actually old-new, or twice-old-new: new in the sense that it has never been published before now, but old because it was actually written long ago, and old-old in the sense that original draft was chopped-about, reworked and amalgamated with other material to make Burgess’s 1982 novel The End of the World News. Back in 1975 Richard Zanuck and David Brown, producers of Jaws, decided their next blockbuster would be a reboot or reworking of When Worlds Collide, and they hired Burgess to come up with a story. With characteristic industry Burgess completed a book-length prose treatment of the idea by January 1976, calling the world-ending object hurtling towards the Earth on a killing trajectory ‘Puma’ and naming the novel after it. The movie, though, was never made.

Then, in 1980, came the success, commercial and critical, of Burgess’s Earthly Powers. It seems his UK and US publishers asked for something comparable, a ‘big’ novel as a follow-up. Burgess responded by welding together a trimmed-down version of Puma (renaming the rogue planet ‘Lynx’) with two other book-length projects he had sitting around in his desk drawer: a novel about the life of Sigmund Freud, originally written at the instigation of Canadian television (who contemplated a TV series on the subject) and the libretto to an unproduced opera about Leon Trotsky visiting New York in 1917. These components were, Burgess conceded with rather devastating offhandedness in an author’s note, ‘shuffled together’ to make End of the World News, cut into chunks and distributed across the whole—the intention, Burgess claimed, was to mimic the choppiness of channel-hopping whilst watching TV.

Burgess aficionados, in other words, have seen this work before, and may be tempted to regard Puma’s standalone publication, a quarter century after its author’s death, as doubly refried beans. That would be a mistake, though. This is a good SF novel, in many ways better than the version included so choppily in the 1982 publication. Here, freed of its adulterations, the story acquires genuine narrative momentum, and its worldbuilding, though designedly schlocky, builds an impressive heft. It is the kind of story that needs to barrel along, interruption-free, and in this version it is allowed to do precisely that.

The disaster, first impending and then actual, is parsed through more than a dozen main characters, Towering Inferno style—1974’s biggest movie and a manifest influence on Burgess’s approach. There are some splendid set-pieces, especially towards the end, and several of them were not included in End of the World News. Governments lie to their populations assuring them that Puma will pass, but they know the impact will destroy the earth, and work in secret to build a space-ark to carry a workable population of humans away from the disaster. The puritanically eugenicist process by which potential crewmembers are chosen (by a computer called VOZ) facilitates a deal of plunging Burgessian satire at the wickedness of calibrating human beings by criteria of absolute efficiency. Vanessa Frame, a pneumatic genius scientist who happens to be the daughter of the designer of the spaceship project is chosen, but her unfaithful, potbellied husband Val Frame finds himself excluded—in the End of the World News version he is deliberately left off the roster; here he is included at his wife’s insistence but gets stranded in a storm-wracked and flooded New York as the rest of the crew fly to Colorado to join the craft.

Val falls-in with the larger-than-life Courtland Willett, a hugely fat and rambunctious actor, once a Shakespearian player, now reduced to dressing up as Santa Claus in shopping malls. There’s a certain amount of verve to the way Burgess writes Willett—fierce, gluttonous, kindly, bold, lecherous, as easily moved to tears as anger, a drinker and smoker and roisterdoister—though, frankly, he loves and so indulges his creation a little too much. Comparisons with Falstaff are invited by the novel itself, but Burgess knows he’s pastiche Shakespeare rather than the real thing (he’s a Will-ette, rather than the full Will) and perhaps as a result overcompensates with long stretches of tiresome Elizabethan swearing: ‘snotnosed bastard … and now that I have leisure and breath, I might add that you are a slabberdegullion druggel, a doddipol jolthead, a blockish grutnol and a turdgut’ [48]. A little of this sort of thing goes a long way and, I’m sorry to say, Burgess gives us great scads of it.

Anyway: Val and Willett become friends, and trek across the disintegrating USA trying to reach the space-ark before it takes-off. They are, as it turns out, heading for an interestingly different novel’s-end than the one Burgess decided on for End of the World News.

Val is that most venal of figures, a writer of science fiction who supplements his income by teaching university courses on the genre; and Burgess takes this pretext to unload some de haut en bas sneering at the genre he is himself writing. Copies of Val’s ‘well-made but trivial fantasies’, we are told, ‘were to be found in airports, tobacconists and pornoshops, and they existed also in cassette adaptations and microfiche’ [34]—a nice example of how rapidly visions of the near future (Burgess in 1975 imagining America in 1999) tend to date. We’re given samples of Val’s fiction, including a number of fruity-sounding titles: ‘Eyelid of Slumber, Maenefa the Mountain, Cuspclasp and Flukefang, Desirable Sight, The Moon Dwindled’ [34]—a rather pleasing Jack Vance vibe to these, I’d say (actually the titles are all lifted from Gerard Manley Hopkins' poems, a favourite of Burgess's). But Val himself loathes his own chosen genre, and unloads on his students.

‘Science fiction is, let’s be honest, ultimately a triviality,’ said Val. ‘It’s brain-tickling, no more. The American cult of mediocrity, which rejects Shakespeare, Milton, Harrison and Abramovitz, had led us to the nonsense of running university courses in science fiction. Christ, we should be studying Blake and Gerard Manley Hopkins.’ This was indiscrete, he was also surprised at the vehemence with which he condemned the very thing he was being paid to promote. [37]

Burgess’s ostentatious flashing his cloven-hoof, here, is more endearing than shocking, the closest this honestly foursquare disaster novel comes to irony. Indeed, it is placed in a complicating context by editor Paul Wake’s inclusion, as appendices, of various accounts of 1970s SF titles from Burgess’s prodigious backlist of book-reviews. Some of these are as dismissive as Burgess’s Val: of Herbert’s Dune Burgess says ‘there is very little intellectual content in SF; neo-technological gimmicks don’t really tickle the higher centres’, and reviewing Gollancz’s 1978 list of genre titles he indulges in some satire at the expense of the gobbledygook he considers SF to be. Not only is it ‘a category of near-popular sub-art, meaning bad typewriterese on coarse paper’, but

SF plots are easily devised. We are a million years in the future, and the world is run by the Krompire, who have police robots called patates under the grim chief with the grafted cybernetic cerebrum whose name is Peruna. There is a forbidden phoneme. If you utter it you divide into two entities which continue to subdivide until you become a million microessences used to feed the life system of Aardappel, the disembodied head of the Krompir. But there is a phonemic cancellant called a burgonya, obtainable on the planet Kartoffel. You can get there by Besterian teleportation, but the device for initiating the process is in the hands of Tapuch Adamah, two-headed head of the underground Jagwaimo, Man must resist the System. The Lovers, who amate according to banned traditional edicts of Terpomo, proclaim Love. [241]

‘Type it out,’ Burgess instructs us, ‘and correct nothing: you will find yourself in the Gollancz SF constellation.’ But the reference to Alfred Bester in amongst all that potato-themed knockabout speaks to a man more familiar with the genre than he is letting-on. And other appendices included here, not least a lengthy, astute and enthusiastic introduction to J G Ballard’s collected short stories, gives the lie to his curmudgeon mode: where SF was concerned, Burgess both knew whereof he spoke and appreciated the things that the genre could do that mimetic fiction could not. I mean: look again at that sketched-out parody—let’s call it A Clockwork Potato—and confess: doesn’t it sound that a rather wonderful book? I’d certainly read it.

Andrew Biswell, director of Manchester’s ‘International Anthony Burgess Foundation’, and Paul Wake, of Manchester Metropolitan University, are general editors of the ongoing collected edition of Burgess’s complete works, the ‘Irwell edition’. Handsome comprehensively-annotated editions of 1965’s A Vision of Battlements 1986’s The Pianoplayers and 1976’s Beard’s Roman Women have already appeared; other titles are in the proverbial pipeline, or perhaps we should say (since Burgess never smoked a pipe) in the metaphorical cigarillo box. 

And notwithstanding his occasional grumpy animadversions against the genre, science fiction fans have good reason to be interested in Burgess. He wrote near future dystopia in A Clockwork Orange (1962) of course, as well as an influential overpopulation yarn The Wanting Seed (1962)—in fact Burgess complained that Harry Harrison stole both the idea and the reveal of Make Room! Make Room! from this novel—and 1985 (1978) is a reworking of Orwell’s celebrated novel. Moreover, Burgess novels not usually considered SF turn out, on closer inspection, to have key genre elements: the husband in One Hand Clapping (1961) is a telepath who has visions of impending global apocalypse, Inside Mr Enderby (1963) is narrated by time-travellers from the future (who in one scene manifest and creep around sleeping Enderby’s bedroom) and Burgess’s last published novel Byrne (1995) returns to near-future dystopian territory. Puma makes a fascinating companion piece to his lifelong, conflicted engagement with genre, quite apart from being an extremely good read in its own right.

[This review originally appeared in Foundation, 2018]