The Kingdom of the Wicked (1985): A Pedant Writes

Hard to disagree with Frank Kermode's assessment of this one:

It’s obvious that Burgess's powers of assimilation are, by the standards of normal or normally lazy writers, exceptional. Nor does he squander the knowledge thus acquired: it goes into a TV series and a novel or a critical biography. One’s admiration for all this prudent industry may sometimes be tempered by a feeling that the product, efficient as it is, lacks aura, lacks the zest we associate with this writer in his more exuberant, less mechanical novels. His last novel-of-the-TV-series, The Kingdom of the Wicked, combines Acts and other early Christian evidence with a rehandling of the I, Claudius historical material into a large, well-conceived and doggedly executed novel, inventive but also well-researched, and authenticated by a scattering or smattering of Greek, Latin and Aramaic words from his polyglot store. For all its informative energy, the book somehow seems a bit dull.

Alas, it is so. Thrifty Burgess, having scripted the 1985 Anglo-Italian TV miniseries A.D., worked his notes up into this hefty novel. But despite kneading great scads of shagging and torture into his story, the loaf of the novel stubbornly refuses to rise. It's not a bad novel. It's just not a very good one.

Perhaps somebody who knows nothing about this period would find it an edifying read, just on the level of historical fact. Then again, who, really, is ignorant of this period? The Roman emperors, variously wicked, venal, psychotic or foolish, engage in a great deal of lubriciously described sex and violence. The early Christians (and the Jews) are all solid, virtuous, grounded and boring. The Roman element of the novel is not merely derivative of Robert Graves's Claudius novels, it is derivative of the sexed-up BBC I Clavdivs telly serial, with attendant simplifications and crudifications. Here's Burgess's Claudius speaking: 'The times need to be washed, scoured, to become the ttttttablet for the writing of a new age. A great ppppppurging and a new beginning' [KOTW, 207]. After Caligula is assassinated, the soldiers go looking about the palace to find his successor. 'The Praetorians saw the drape that bulged tremulously, yanked it off its rod. It billowed about Claudius who went kkkk' [KOTW, 160]. You're picturing Derek Jacobi delivering these lines, aren't you?  TV feeds on TV. The Jewish material is partly straightforward padding-out of the Acts of the Apostles, after the accepted manner of historical fiction; and partly chunks of decanted Burgessian research (this is how a stoning was performed, these are Jewish funeral rights, and so on).

Sadoc, our narrator, is the son of Azor, the figure who narrated Burgess's underwhelming Man of Nazarus (1979). Some of the former novel's elements are carried through, particularly Burgess's insistence that Jesus was a great hulk of a man, of giant-stature and huge strength and physical endurance. Sadoc tells us that he survived the crucifixion in a kind of stupor (the so-called 'swoon' theory of the resurrection), saw his disciples one last time and then pushed off, none know wither. But where Man of Nazarus admitted some miracles into its narrative, The Kingdom of the Wicked is much more rigidly materialist about things: implausibly so for something supposed written by a 1st-century Jew. Rather than people actually getting raised from the dead, we get things like this old woman, whose body has been tossed onto a pile of camel dung in Samaria:

Philip knelt near to the woman, put his ear to her breast, heard a faint but rhythmical heartbeat. He knew she would recover soon. With Greek cunning, he used the circumstances to the advantage of the faith. 'Ponder on the goodness of God and his Son Jesus Christ,' he told the surrounding crowd. [KOTW, 97]

When the woman 'was shakily on her feet again' he claims it as a miracle. Throughout the book everything apparently supernatural gets, Scooby-Doo-like, explained away. Saul's visions of God are down to his epilepsy. Peter is mightily surprised that he appears to have raised Dorcas from death, and he and Thomas stumble downstairs in a panicky hurry. All this inevitably tends to drain the magic from the narrative and leaves the folk in the story rather under-motivated. Burgess may not believe in miracles, but he needs to believe that his first-century characters believed in miracles.

At least Sadoc is a rather more fancy prose-stylist than was his Dad. The book is, happily, full of the echt Burgess: words like 'mastupration' [58] 'polycolpous' [177], 'heresiarch' [191], 'pseudobarbarian' [334] and phrases like embracing as with love the stone pillar of punition [55] and the arborial similitude persisted [190]. There's a deeply implausible story about a Roman centurion called Marcus Julius Tranquillius falling in love with a Jewish slavegirl and throwing over his culture, family and military rank (Roman soldiers being legally prevented from marrying) to wed her. Boldly, or perhaps with the inadvertence of a scholar's dotage, Burgess puts sermons into Saint Paul's mouth of such breathtaking aridity and dullness that the rapid spread of Christianity itself becomes explicable only in terms of miraculous divine intervention. For surely nobody would be won over by:

This implies a willingness to worship a negativity, which neither grammar nor theology will properly permit. Now I would ask you to consider a singular and unique God ... Now God has been tolerant towards human ignorance of him, but now he commands that men repent of this ignorance. That this ignorance be no longer excused by the sense of his remoteness, which encouraged his conversion on the part of men either to a thought or a thing. I teach anastasis, which signifies not the survival of the soul, which any of your Platonists could demonstrate at least as a logical possibility, but as the survival of the sensorium also, though in a transfigured form. For God the Son himself rose from the dead and, in that filial or human aspect, returned to the eternal home of the Father. That, learned men of Athens, is the gist of my message. [KOTW, 221]

It's seems that there were at that time rumours of things going astray. Conceivably this is indeed actually a sort of homage to Python: in You've Had Your Time, Burgess claims he watched Life of Brian a dozen times, and early in Kingdom of the Wicked Burgess includes a Palinesque healed beggar-cripple, who spends his time leaping about saying 'and here's a question for you: how do I earn my living from now on?' [KOTW, 39].  Not sure I'd call this well-judged.

Near the beginning of his Demotic Greek narrative, Sadoc says:

You will find, I expect, recurring through my narrative the fine phrase una nox dormienda, which I take from Catullus ... una nox dormienda means that one final night that has to be slept through after a few score years of pain and its palliations, of pleasure and disgust after pleasure. ... [As for] those who have drunken most thirstily of the Nazarene doctrine of a new life, let them believe what their wretchedness bids them believe: they will find una nox dormienda like the rest of us. [KOTW, 3]

Of course, only a pedant would object that the last of these iterations should be unam noctem dormiendam. A pedant, perhaps, provoked by Burgess's boastful postscript (in which he lists his sources as 'Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus and the Acts of the Apostles' adding 'I thought these it best to consult these in the original tongues'). A pedant who finds it hard to believe that somebody who claims to have read Tacitus in the original doesn't know that the accusative of nox is noctem. But we can let that lie. Don't worry. The pedant will calm himself, eventually.*

[Deep breath]. The Calm-down of the Pedant.


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*To be fair, I havered over whether nox should indeed take the accusative, or whether it should perhaps take the dative, following 'find'. But I don't pretend to be an expert. Other pedantic notes:

(1) one character dies after 'an infection' from 'cutting her finger along with the evening loaf' [25], like somebody out of a Hovis advert. Knives might be used on meat, but not on bread, which would be torn. And the ordinary evening loaf of a Jewish family would surely be unleavened. Also: 'infection' isn't a very 1st-century AD concept.

(2) ' ...embellished with Graeco-Syrian mosaic work depicting the coupling of Apollo and Artemis, for the cult of Astarte had arisen out of solar-lunar myths of western provenance on which Asiatic mysticism had been imposed' [173]. This wouldn't be out of place in a late 19th-century work of anthropological theology, but I challenge you to find anything like it in a 1st-century popular narrative.

(3) Saul, blind after his Damascene experience, is led back to the city. 'In total blackness ... [he] saw, as in a preternatural sunlight, the rooms and corridors of his own brain. It was the same brain as before, though the voice still echoed in it' [KOTW, 120]. The belief that consciousness 'resides' in the brain, as a person might in a house, is a post-17th-century, not Roman, Greek or Jewish, conceit. In the first century AD Philosophers were still debating whether the soul was located in the head or the chest, whilst Stoic thought argued (influentially) that consciousness was a pneuma that suffused the whole body.

(4) A Roman praetor yells at Paul and his followers: 'are you the men who were preaching some outlandish superstitious mumbojumbo contrary to the laws of Rome yesterday?' [KOTW, 215]. But there were no Roman laws against preaching; religion was specifically excluded from private law, and state law was very permissive of all sorts of cults and religions provided only they acknowledged the divinity of the emperor. A law passed in 81 BC outlawed human sacrifice; and things like building temples and so on were limited by legislation. Otherwise Rome let people get on with religion pretty much unmolested. When Claudius's imperial edict banished the Jews from Rome in AD 49 it was for disturbing the peace, rioting and so on, not because of their religious faith.

(5) A Roman character feels his guts move. 'Where are you going?' 'The cloaca. I ate something I shouldn't' [339]. But cloaca means public sewer or drains, not toilet (that's latrina). Nobody popping to the loo would say 'I'm just off to the public sewer'.

(6) The Emperor Caligula 'was on his feet, stamping his little boots' [134]. It's true that Gaius's nickname 'caligula' means 'little boots'; when his father Germanicus, an immensely popular general, went on campaign in Germany he took his son, aged 5, along, and had a miniature military kit made up, including miniature caliga, the hob-nailed boot soldiers wore. That was when he was five. Gaius became emperor at the age of 25. If he was still wearing 5-year-old-boy's boots then there would have been something seriously wrong with his feet. Fully grown man: teeny-tiny feet. I'm sure somebody would have said something.

(7) 'Caleb leaped to smash the German's nose, whose thyrls spouted hairferns like twin cornucopiae' [KOTW, 128]. This is less an anachronism—though how a Mediterranean Jew like our narrator Sadoc came by the Anglo Saxon word þyrel (“a hole made through anything, opening, aperture, orifice, perforation”; hence 'nose-thirl', 'nostril') is anyone's guess. But really I quote the line here because it's just, well, wow. I mean: stylistically speaking it's really, well. Wow.