Medipal Fictions: MF (1971)

This novel is not, whatever Wikipedia and the recent Penguin re-release think, called 'M/F':

The title is a simple juxtaposition of male and female, Miles and Faber, mezzo-forte, mother and fucker: MF. See?

That lack-of-line (and to be fair, AB himself seemed happy for it to be called either title) seems to me important. It's not a book about structurally separating out constituent elements, or distinguishing S/Z-like between similar but differently operative terms. On the contrary, it's a book about glomming together the sorts of things convention would rather keep apart You've Had Your Time records Burgess reading about a particular Algonquin myth in Lévi-Strauss's The Scope of Anthropology:

A boy finds his sister being sexually assaulted by his own double. He kills the double, only to discover that he was the son of a very powerful witch who has taught owls to talk. She looks for her lost son, now buried, and the brother has to pretend to be that son. The witch has her suspicions, which can be allayed only by the boy's marrying his own sister: no one would be so mad as to fracture the incest taboo. But even after the marriage the witch is not quite convinced, so she sets her talking owls to ask the pseudo-son riddles: if he gives the right answers, as Oedipus did to the Sphinx, she will know that he has committed the unpardonable sin and hence is not her son. The brother and sister escape when he unwittingly answers the riddles correctly, and they fly into the heavens, there to become the sun and moon in eclipse. What I saw in the legend was the possibility of composing a contemporary realistic novel in which all the structural desiderata were fulfilled without the uninstructed reader's needing to know or care. [YHYT, 208]

It's hard to really believe that last sentence. Not that Burgess failed to generate a contemporary novel of great energy and richness, a novel that evokes many of the qualia of verisimilitude. It is rather that Burgess proved incapable of leaving the reader uninstructued about his complex of structural desiderata, here riddling and allusive. I talked about this itch to explain with respect to Burgess's previous novel, Enderby Outside. It is in MF, of all his novels, this is the one where Burgess most fully takes on the mantle of his alter-ego, Explainderby.

He does this in an essay called 'Oedipus Wrecks', originally published in This Man and Music (1982). The intricate story of Michael Faber (MF, se): a 20-year-old expelled from his New York college for having sex in public, who goes on a eventful and highly-coloured peregrination around the Caribbean in search of the shrine of Sib Legeru, a poet and painter from Castita. The whole story is set in motion by Faber's family lawyer, whose name ('Loewe') is both a near-homophone for lawyer and a leonine indication of the novel's habit of treating its human characters as Jupiter Ascending mythic animal types. The real object search folds together oedipal self-knowledge and incest, although in this case the incest is front-loaded. 'What's your view of incest?' a character called Pardaleos asked him, early on [45]. Faber replies:

Incest, incest, Keeping sex in the family. Most cultures have pretty rigid taboos on incest. My own ancestral one, for instance. Oedipus, Electra, all that. Some don't care much. England didn't. They didn't bring in their Incest Act til 1908. [46]

Faber strives to avoid fucking his own sister, yet every effort he makes only paradoxically brings that consummation closer. That's the larger structure of the whole; there are a great many cryptic-crossword clues, acrostics and allusions along the way ,and Burgess's 'Oedipus Wrecks' explains them all. The whole riddling web is unpicked, along with a series of quite interesting speculations on incest. The essay is available here. It's full of this sort of stuff:

Miles clearly has a mad Oedipal talent. He can answer riddles and solve crosswords with no trouble. He makes, with the total automatism he gives to smoking, a riddle on the name of the lawyer Loewe:

Behold the sheep form side by side A Teuton roarer of the pride.

Lo means behold, ewe is a sheep, and in German Loewe is a lion. Nearly all the people Miles will meet in the course of the narrative will either have animal names or resemble animals. This prefigures a sphingine danger to the young Oedipus.

And so on. Chapter two opens in a restaurant, where waitresses keep interrupting Miles's thought processes by shouting out various orders. Burgess explains his own riddle here, an acrostic: 'Indiana (or Illinois) nutbake. Chuffed eggs. Saffron toast. Whiting in tarragon, hot. Michigan (or Missouri) oyster-stew. Tenderloin. Hash, egg. Ribs.' On and on it goes, explaining, explaining, explaining to the bitter end. The poet is called 'Sib Legeru' because 'Anglo-Saxon bishop Wulfstan called incest siblegeru, or lying with one's sib.'

It's a gobsmacking performance, not least because it renders the initial riddling pointless, presenting the crossword-grid to the reader with the answers already written into it. We might want to read it a number of different ways. For example, one might chalk it up to that mode of clever Burgess's insecurity, his sense that nobody who reviewed MF on its appearance really 'got' it, his desire (I think this was how Gilbert Adair put it in his intro to the recent Penguin reissue) to write for himself the proper review of the novel that reviewers had been too negligent to provide.

Thinking about it, though, I wonder if Burgess's ambition wasn't more metatextual. We think of writing fiction as an outward looking, broadcast undertaking: as exogamy, in other words. The writers puts out his or her work, the reader (unrelated to the writer) receives it, and husbands it. Strange and new and sometimes exotic growths proceed from this expollination, very often far removed from authorial intention and life. But in MF Burgess having jetted out a novel, seeks also to explain and so control the interpretation of the novel. It's like watching an animated cartoon on the television that comes pre-supplied with a laugh-track; wholly imaginary characters act funny, and a wholly fictional audience responds with hilarity. It's hard, as the flesh-and-blood observer, to do anything other than turn the TV off at such a performance, leave the non-people to their non-pleasure.

The situation isn't quite that, I suppose. But my point is that Burgess's dyad of novel and solution provides a quasi-incestuous version of a process we're more used to thinking of as exogamous.
as Burgess puts it in the 'Oedipus Wrecks' essay:

The taboo placed on [incest] is one that not even a rational age cares to question too closely. Inbreeding, say the eugenicists, weakens the stock, but that is too recent a discovery to explain the ferocity with which the prohibition has been enforced in most societies from the earliest times. The rationale of the ban on endogamy, or marrying within one's own social group or family or tribe, can only be presented in terms of the territorial imperative – the need to protect land through alliances, expressed in a law of exogamy. In ancient Egypt, which was powerful and stable and had no enemies, incest was not merely permitted but was mandatory in the royal house. Monarchical Europe, on the other hand, protected territory through foreign alliances confirmed by royal marriages or high-class exogamy. From ancient Greece on, incest became the most terrible of crimes because it compromised the security of the state.

The state, here, is Literature; and in this inward-looking novel Burgess is tacitly proposing a kind of Egyptian stasis of post-Joycean Literary hegemony. I don't mean as an actual manifesto, in the real literary world (a world with which AB continued interacting on a thoroughly exogamous, and indeed lucrative, basis for decades). But as the premise for this strange, deliberately-convoluted and riddling novel.

The 'Oedipus Wrecks' essay deliberately sets out to render interpretive analysis of the novel by me superfluous. I'm happy to accept my superfluity. The riddle of the critic is easier to solve than the riddle of the author. Explanation is incestuous, and the asymptote of incest is autoeroticism, the love of self that turns altro to mono, truth to fiction. And the biting question with this particular piece of mono-fiction is: does Burgess really need readers, critics or interpreters? Where do we fit into the smoothly self-redirected automyth? We-dipus Rex has become Me-dipus Rex. Maybe that's an accomplishment all its own. I don't know.

Explainderby: Enderby Outside (1968)

Though there's much stylistic energy and fun here, the fact is Enderby Outside is not a patch on its masterful predecessor Inside Mr Enderby. I'd say there are three problems. One is that the plot is skittish and slight, built around a series of random zigzag events, and in the final analysis a mere vehicle for an ovedetermined Beatlephobia that has (as I've noted on this blog before) aged very badly indeed. Two has to do, I think, with an aesthetic fuzziness about the relationship between Burgess and his creation. As they go on, the Enderby novels come closer and closer to echt AB, drawing on specific experiences of the man in his most famous decade; but by doing so they enact a kind of violence upon the integrity of the novels as novels. The things that happen to poor old Enderby beggar belief, not because they involve wildly improbably plots and the appearance on earth of the actual Muse of poetry, but because they reduce the protagonist to a kind of semi-transparent overlay upon autobiographical-Burgess in ways that hamstring the ability to the novels to work beyond the level of meta-commentary. So, the tacit plot of Enderby Outside is that Anthony Burgess's writing (Enderby's poetry) has, with the connivance of his ex-wife, been plagiarised by, and is therefore responsible for, the global success of The Beatles (= Yod Crewsey and the Crewsey Fixers). Pull the other one. The third problem is one that increasingly encroaches on Burgess at this stage of his career: explaining. Explainy explaining. I'll come back to that.

When Enderby is implicated in the murder of Yod Crewsey, that is to say, of John Lennon, and has to flee to Morocco, Burgess is positioning himself as in effect responsible for both the success of, and the death of, the biggest pop band the world has ever known, styling himself as, under the gaze of our present-day retrospection, a weird Lennon/McCartney/Mark Chapman hybrid. It's hard to imagine any novel could possible carry the weight of such staggeringly innocent-eyed hubris.

The point, of course, is that the conceit of the novel didn't strike Burgess as hubristic, because he genuinely didn't see the greatness or larger cultural significance of The Beatles. You might even feel sorry for him. How was he to know that the Muse had actually withdrawn her grace from all those small-scale neo-Donne-esque Movement poets and instead bestowed her bounty on four louche blokes from Liverpool? By the 1980s Burgess had rowed-back his hostility a little, but it's worth remembering that in the late 60s it was at its peak. It works its way into the oddest places, as in this passage from AB's previous novel A Tremor of Intent that, really, has neither bearing on nor place in that novel at all. Hillier, the spy narrator, recalls being:

sick; I vomited a bellyload into the gutter. What made my shame worse was the visit of some British louts with guitars and emetic little songs; they filled the Opera House with intantile screamers. [Tremor, 48]

What is, in the earlier novel, only a sideswipe becomes in Enderby Outside a full-frontal swipe. A big belly-shove at the British louts with guitars.

They were, he thought, about as horrible in appearance as it was possible to imagine any four young men to be. The one Hogg knew to be their leader, Yod Crewsy, received, because of his multiple success, the most homage, and he accepted this as his due, simpering out of a lopsided mouth that was too large to be properly controlled and, indeed, seemed to possess a kind of surrealist autonomy. The other three were vulgarly at home, punching each other in glee and then doing a kind of ring-a-roses round the Prime Minister. The working photographers flashed and flashed like an epidemic of sharp sneezes. [225]

This is in the bar of the London hotel where Enderby (as Hogg) is working, and the popstars are meeting the Wilson-y Prime Minister, no less. The unusual first name 'Yod' is presumably chosen for its mildly sacrilegious overtones (when first hearing of the band, Enderby is unimpressed: '"I bet," divined Hogg, "that he called himself Crewsy just so he could make up that blasphemous name. And that Yod bit doesn't sound Christian to me. Yod," he told Mr Holden, "is a letter of the Hebrew alphabet."'). Yodh is the Hebrew 'J', and though a y-ish palatal approximant rather than the /dj/ with which the English name John starts, we can take it as an abbreviation of Lennon's first name. Crewsy seems a bit of a stretch from Lennon. Still: presumably the joke is to approximate the cruci-word to 'crazy', and therefore suggest that the heroes of modern youth are off their chump. On the other hand, I was rather pleased to discover that there is a present-day US Byrds-style band called 'Yod Crewsy & the Dark Marbles'. For myself, I reserve the band-name 'Anders B. Burgside and the Burgsiders' for future musical use.

Anyhow: AB snarks at Lennon as a man whose orange is at least partly clockwork (he uses Russian slang like Alex, declaiming one of Enderby's plagiarised poems in order to 'show that we do like think a bit and the kvadrats ... can't have it all their own way' [231]; that's квадрат, 'square'). Also Burgess has a weird bee in his bonnet about young people saying 'yeah', or as he prefers Germanically to render it, 'ja'. Customers in Enderby/Hogg's London bar use the word, 'young film makers' drinking in Morocco use the word, and then in the novel's early big set-piece we get the Crewsy Fictions current hit, a strained parody of 'She Loves You':

Yod Crewsy held a flat guitar with flex sprouting from it. In front of each of the others was a high-mounted sidedrum. They poised white sticks, grinning. Then they jumped into a hell of noise belched out fourfold by speakers set at the ceiling's corners.

You can do that, ja, and do this. Ja.
You can say that you won't go beyond a kiss. Ja.
But where's it goin to get ya, where's
It goin to get
Ya (ja), babaaah?

I daresay it's harsh to blame Burgess for being behind the curve. Why should we expect him to keep up with the artistic evolution of a group he hates? But it's worth noting that the simplistic chanting of 'She Loves You' was 1963; the writing of this 1968 novel happened two years after 'Tomorrow Never Knows', a year after 'A Day In The Life', 'Strawberry Fields' and the comprehensive reinvention of the expressive potential of pop music. But, hey: we get it. Burgess despised The Beatles. He presumably thought, of Enderby Outside, that the Yod Crewsey stuff was a sideline in a novel primarily about rebirth, poetic inspiration and the female principle. But the Crewsey stuff is what turned out to be culturally important for the sixties (visit Liverpool if you don't believe me; one doesn't fly into 'Manchester Anthony Burgess Airport', after all). It's as if Dickens, after a quick dig about the awfulness of Industrialisation, Gothic Fiction and Music Hall, went on to devote the rest of his novels to personal crotchets about plagiary and the cheapening of the myth of the hanged god ('most of the newspaper concentration now seemed to be on Yod Crewsy as a dying god, not one of the daily victims of common murderous assault' [296]; 'girls weeping, as over Osiris or Adonis or somebody' [336]; 'And now sermons about miracles and popsters flocking to give thanks. Our Thammuz, Adonis, Christ for that matter. [344]'.)

So: a priest shoots Lennon/Crewsy down, hands the gun to Enderby and runs off. We later discover that this was a publicity stunt, but for the moment a terrified Enderby thinks it real and flees rather than take the fall. Despite the fact that the Prime Minister was in the room when the gun was discharged (uh, Special Branch? I mean, I know it's the 60s but still) he gets easily away, takes a plane and, via some rather heavy-footed misadventures in Spain, winds up in Morocco.  Here he tumbles into the bar run by his old adversary and fellow poet Rawcliffe. The bar is called the Acantilado Verde ('Green cliff, raw cliff,' the owner explains [328]), and dying Rawcliffe gifts it to Enderby to atone for his earlier plagiary of his Pet Beast into the Spaghetti Western, as per Inside Mr Enderby.

The novel ends with Enderby happy: financially self-sufficient in a warm climate, not only writing poetry again but literally visited by the muse: a beautiful woman—'she looked at him from green eyes sprinkled, like a sireh quid, with gold' and so on—of forceful character and a fondness for pungent food (it is she who provides the novel with its most famous sentence: 'She breathed on him (though a young lady should not eat, because of the known redolence of onions, onions) onions' [354]). She seems to know all about him, steers him roughly away from bad poetry and towards good. It seems, according to her, that he's in the right place:

“You can get something here. This is a junction. Deucalion's flood and Noah's. Africa and Europe. Christianity and Islam. Past and future. The black and the white. Two rocks looking across at each other. The Straits may have a submarine tunnel. But it was Mallarmé who said that poetry is made with words, not ideas."

"How do you know all this? You're so young."

She spat out breath very nastily. "There you go again. More interested in the false divisions than the true ones. Come on, let's have that sestet." [359]

What the final quarter of the book gives us, though, is symptomatic of a peculiar weakness in Burgess's writing from this period, one that comes into a sort of bristling maximum in his next novel, MF: that is, the urge not just to write cleverly but to explain how and in what ways one has been clever. In MF the knotty coding of the fiction is laboriously laid out in a long essay Burgess published that functions, in effect, as a preface to the novel; better, insofar as prefaces can be discarded. Here though it is kneaded fat-fistedly into the very dough of the novel. Enderby plans to write a series of 'Revolutionary Sonnets', and ploddingly spells out the rationale:

Enderby was moderately pleased with the poem, but he was more pleased with the prospect of a bigger structure, a sequence. Some years before he had published the volume called Revolutionary Sonnets. The book had contained things other than sonnets, but the title had derived from that opening group of twenty, each of which had tried to encapsulate—exploiting the theme and countertheme paradigm of the Petrarchan form-some phase of history in which a revolution had taken place. He felt now that it might be possible to wrest those twenty sonnets from that volume and, by adding twenty more with the cooperation of the Muse, build a sizeable sequence which would make a book on its own. A new title would be needed-something more imaginative than the old one, something like Conch and Cortex or something. So far he had these two sonnets—the Garden of Eden one and the new one about man building his own world outside the Garden. Somewhere at the back of his mind there pricked the memory of his having started and then abandoned, in a very rough state, another sonnet that, nicely worked up and carefully polished, would make a third. It was, he thought, really an anterior sonnet to these two, an image of the primal revolution in heaven—Satan revolting, that sort of thing. Lucifer, Adam, Adam's children. Those would make the first three. [265-66]

Eventually we get the start of the new sonnet:

Augustus on a guinea sat in state—
The sun no proper study but each shaft
Of filtered light a column: classic craft
Abhorred the arc or arch. To circulate
(Blood or ideas) meant pipes, and pipes were straight
As loaves were gifts from Ceres when she laughed. [318]

And then, as the reader's heart sinks deeper, we get a line-by-line explanation of the sonnet:

Gloomily he read through his sonnet octave again. Augustus on a guinea sat in state. This is the eighteenth century, the Augustan age, and that guinea is a reduction of the sun. The sun no proper study. Exactly, the real sun being God and that urban life essentially a product of reason, which the sun melts. And no more sun-kings, only Hanoverians. But each shaft of filtered light a column. Meaning that you can't really do without the sun, which gives life, so filter it through smoked glass, using its energy to erect neo-classic structures in architecture or literature (well, The Rambler, say, or The Spectator, and there's a nuance in "shaft" suggesting wit). Classic craft abhorred the arc or arch. Yes, and those ships sailed a known world, unflood-able by a rational God, and the arc-en-ciel covenant is rejected. Something like that. To circulate (blood or ideas) meant pipes, and pipes were straight. Clear enough. You need the roundness of the guinea only so that it can roll along the straight streets or something of commercial enterprise. The round bores of the pipes are not seen on the surface, the pipes in essence being means of linking points by the shortest or most syllogistical way. And, to return to that guinea, impress on it the straight line of royal descent. And, to return to that pipe business, remember that pipes were smoked in coffee-houses and that news and ideas circulated there. And that craft business ties up with Lloyd's coffee-house. As loaves were gifts from Ceres when she laughed, Thyrsis was Jack. A bit fill-in for rhyme's sake, but, rejecting the sun, you reject life and can only accept it in stylised mythological or eclogue forms. But Jack leads us to Jean-Jacques. Crousseau on a raft sought Johnjack's rational island—The pivot coming with the volta. Defoe started it off: overcome Nature with reason. But the hearer will just hear Crusoe. Jack is dignified to John, glorification of common, or natural, man. Then make Nature reason and you start to topple into reason's antithesis, you become romantic. Why? A very awkward job, the continuation.

What can it be about, this mighty urge to explain to the reader, except a sort of unconfidence, not in one's own ingenuity so much as in one's readership? The Muse, we might object, will be perfectly uninterested in all that. On and on it goes:

The sestet ended in a drinking-shop not far from the Souk or Socco, over glasses of warmish pastis. Drab long robes, hoods, ponchos, ass-beaters, loud gargling Moghrabi, nose-picking children who used the other hand to beg. Sympathetic, Enderby gave them little coins.

Therefore he picked it. All things thawed to action,
Sound, colour. A shrill electric bell
Summoned the guard. He gathered up his faction,
Poised on the brink, thought and created hell.
Light shimmered in miraculous refraction
As, like a bloody thunderbolt, he fell.

"That bloody," Enderby said. "It's meant really to express grudging admiration. But that only works if the reader knows I've taken the line from Tennyson's poem about the eagle." [359]

Thanks, Tony, for explaining where the line comes from. Sheesh.

It seems to me that we're touching on something quite important about Burgess's art, here. The question is: how far can an artist go if he or she simply doesn't have faith in their audience? Even his own novel tries to warn Burgess away from this ('to hell with the reader', the Muse insists) but he can't quite believe it. The reader must be told. It's vital the reader see and comprehend. There's more than a whiff of authorial ressentiment behind this, I think; something You've Had Your Time is remarkably, indeed refreshingly honest about: 'there was too much of that sort of thing going on' he grinches, of the later 1960s: 'my own creative work ignored, my over-generous laudations of other writers augmented into a supposed scholarly passion.' To be specific: 'I was sick of being left out of the compendia which exalted Alan Sillitoe and David Storey' [YHYT, 88]. This sourness is hardly admirable in itself, of course, but it's perfectly human. The problem is not that Burgess felt this way. It's that he believed that it was the result of insufficient comprehension of his cleverness by his audience. The gap between the merit of what one creates and the way the world treats it can be wide, is often grievous to the author, and it may be opened by many factors. But it cannot be bridged by the timbers of Explanation. 'You disregarded what I wrote, through indifference or hostility. But wait until I have explained it all to you! Ah, then you will love it.' Art-love doesn't work that way.

This, in fact, is one of the ways the myth of the Muse can work. Not that there is a quasi-human partner who can guide you through the choices you make in the rhymes of your sestet; but rather that the affections of the gods are distributed about the world in ways that bear little relation to worth or effort. That the Muse did not love Burgess's poetry is not a judgement on how hard he worked at it. That the Muse, patently, did love the music and the words of The Beatles has little to do with worth as measured by sophistication, literary allusion or poetic form. There you go, though. I had a conversation with James Bradley on Facebook a while ago about this very matter: it's very obvious that Lennon and McCartney's lyrics were tossed out, bodged together, improvised in more or less careless ways. It's obvious, too, that many of those lyrics look crude, especially written down. Yet they have affected me in more profound and lasting ways than Yeats (and Yeats has affected me very deeply). Go figure. One thing to which the Beatles never stooped, mind you, was laborious explanation of what they were trying to do in their art. Indeed, in 'Glass Onion', they actually satirised the urge to explain with a mockingly false hermeneutic of their own songs. There's something in that.

Bond Unbound: Tremor of Intent (1965)

:1:

There's an interesting essay to be written, I think, about the way our age likes to take any given idealised fantasy of elegance, or empowerment, or escape, or supercompetence and rub its nose in the dirt. I'm talking about the shift in broader cultural taste away from stories of Tolkienesque pre-raphaelite grace and beauty towards stories of G R R Martin grimness, darkness, cynicism and horror. Or the way Batman no longer 'works' as primary-coloured larking about and must instead be darkly knighted. Or, to come closer to the matter of the book under discussion, the way spy stories no longer 'work' as Roger Moore in a polyester whistle, exotic holidays with a bit of artfully rendered nookie on the side, interspersed with some balletically choreographed fisticuffs and running-around. Now the reboot is on the other refit: Daniel Craig, tied to a chair, must scowl toughly whilst heavies thwack him in the testicles with a lead weight. Now the audience must be made to feel as if every punch is connecting with bone, must see blood and torment and the misery of the beaten. We can't say that what was once 'mere escapism' is now 'dark and realistic', because there's nothing realistic about new Bond, Bourne, Dark Knight or any of them. They are all still exercises in aesthetic convention, not mimesis; still predicated on the mendacity that violence is thrilling and 'gets results', rather than the much more dramatically inert truth that violence is distressing and destructive, as damaging to the perpetrator's psyche as to the victim's body and mind. The mendacity that spying is an adventure, rather than a boring dayjob, 50% admin, 30% sitting tediously around, 5% meetings with line managers and the rest drink.

I don't want to labour this point. If you watch Octopussy and haughtily comment that 'real spywork is nothing like this' your interlocutor will of course agree. If you watch Skyfall and say the same thing, you're more likely to be deprecated for spoiling everyone's fun. Yet Skyfall is precisely as far removed from actual spying as the earlier movie, the one in which Swedish supermodel Maud Adams plays an Indian begum and MI6 has bugged the world's supply of Fabergé eggs. Indeed, since people in real life laugh a lot, and since the Octopussy at least achieves a degree of humour, it is arguably more 'life-like' than the ponderously earnest Daniel Craig film. The point being, real is not the deal these texts offer us, not what we go to them for. Real is a salient only insofar as we want these texts not to flaunt too openly that there's nothing real about them. We have, after all, our pride.

The larger truth, I tend to think, is a sort of inverse square law. The more comfortable and pampered the middle-class Western book-reading, film-going audience becomes, the more they feel the urge for a contrasting grimness in their art. Just as desert people dream of oases and green gardens (or so I have heard), it can be that people who have spent their whole lives oasily cosseted sometimes dream of the compensatory fantasy of desert hardness. Not that we want actual hardship and misery (that's not what masochistic fantasy is ever really about), but that it supplies the something we feel, on some level, to be missing. By giving us fun and games overlaid with a rubric of severity, Casino Royale and Skyfall enable us to feel superior to the pumpkinheads who believe spying to be nought but a laugh and a lark and a walk in the park. We know better. We know that the world is really a horrible, brutal place, In fact, the less horrible and brutal our actual lives, the more extravagantly horrible and brutal we believe the world to be. Hence the success of Saw, Hostel, Game of Thrones et al. The problem with comfort, to return for a moment to silky-voiced Alec Guinness in blackface, is that an irkfree life adds up to so little it might look like nothing at all. And no man needs nothing.

The alternative to Daniel Craig being squelch-crunchingly beaten about the testicles (whilst at other times having sex with a procession of beautiful women and acting as our proxy in a series of theme-park-ride-style action sequences) is to go to the other extreme. It's possible to write spy stories that stress the tedium of actual spying. John le Carré has occasionally done this, and books like The Looking Glass War and A Small Town in Germany are, impressively, almost as dull as the diplomatic and civil-service worlds they set out to describe. It would have been a big ask for le Carré to (if you'll excuse me) le carry on with this approach, and his later novels are generally more richly supplied with incident and local colour: Jerry Westerby going rogue and repeatedly shooting his gun in exotic Far Eastern locales in The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) for instance. 'Real' is a fetish word, and not really what we want, or we'd spend our time on documentary and history. Objecting to the fictionality of fiction as 'unrealistic' is like objecting to opera on the grounds that in real life people don't communicate exclusively via singing. It misses the point.

Yet there's something there, isn't there: some reason why we prefer our spy stories to pay lip-service to 'reality'. If genre Fantasy is one of the ways  we come to terms with our past, vampire stories are how we mediate our sexual desires and anxieties, and crime fiction our eschatological fears, then spy stories have some important role to play in our relationship to politics and international relations. These adventures, the moral landscape they sketch out, the sense of urgency and importance, articulate a crucial something that political news reporting generally fails to: that this stuff matters, I suppose.

'Reality' can be more than a surface documentary verisimilitude. The pairing of gentility and violence of the Bond franchise, however unlikely it seems on the surface, perhaps speaks to a deeper truth about the 'reality' of the colonial and post-colonial world. It's similar to what Lukács says about Nietzsche: 'Admirers of the "purified" Nietzsche have been hard put to unite his sanctioning of barbarity with an often subtle and rarefied cultural critique. But we can easily dispose of this dichotomy. In the first place, the union of ultra-refinement and brutality was by no means a personal quirk requiring psychological elucidation, but a universal, psychical-moral distinguishing mark of imperialist decadence. [“Nietzsche as Founder of Irrationalism in the Imperialist Period”, in The Destruction of Reason (1954; 1980), 100]. James Bond's impeccable palate and appetite for fine dining and his ability of break a man's neck with his bare hands fit together in exactly the same way.

One of the conceits of Burgess's sole foray into spy-thriller writing. Tremor of Intent, is that the Cold War East-West 'Communism versus Capitalism' struggle was at root a religious conflict, a game echoing two cosmic forces, black and white, that antedate even God. 'God and Notgod', is how the novel styles it. I'd say the subsequent history has tended to falsify this view, or we'd be as hip-deep in West-versus-Islam thrillers today as we once were in West-versus-Reds back in the day. But it's an interesting approach, for a writer setting out to 'deconstruct' the form. And it's easy to forget just how popular and capacious a genre the Cold War thriller used to be, how ripe a target it once was for the higher-brow treatment.

At any rate, Burgess's sole spy-thriller is not like any other I have read. It is as ever with AB very well written, on the level of specific scenes, of dialogue and in its passages of Joycean textual play. Nor is it badly plotted, or structured, although it is certainly weirdly plotted and strangely shaped. But there are many of the satisfactions of 'conventional' spy thrillers here, an ingenious series of twists and turns, carefully described sex, violence and eating, and a fisheyelense treatment of an actual contemporary scandal of the intelligence world (as Tinker Tailor is to the Kim Philby affair, so this novel is to the Profumo scandal). It's often funny. is always readable, but nonetheless it leaves a strange taste in the mouth. Having thought about it, I wonder if this isn't the taste of disappointment, and that, rather than the scylla of ultraviolence on the one hand, and the charybdis of secretarial tedium on the other, is how Burgess sets out to bring the spy genre as a whole back to—for want of a better word—reality.

:2:

When Goldfinger threatens to saw Sean Connery in half ('do you expect me to talk?' 'I expect you to die Mr Bond!') the scene exists primarily to enable Connery to demonstrate his admirable sang froid. Roger Moore skis off a cliff but saves himself with a union jack parachute, perhaps hidden in his underpants, showing thereby his preparedness. Daniel Craig is testicularly tortured but does not crack, demonstrating his toughness. Burgess's spy, Denis Hillier, recalls a similar scene out of the stock spy adventure, being branded by a supervillain with said villain's initial letter. But Burgess takes this in a rather different direction:

Welcome it, welcome it, he had told his body, as Soskice's executioner voluptuously delayed the searing impact. ... he had not screamed, feeling the intolerable bite, the pain itself S-shaped. The S has hissed into his very bowels, the sphincter—weakest of all the muscles—bidding them open to expel the snake whose body was all teeth. Soskice was disgusted, but no more so than Hillier. 'I didn't mean that,' Hillier had moaned. 'I apologize.' And they had left him for a time in his mess, delaying the consummation. And that delay had (oh, it was a long story bringing in a man called Kosciusko) saved his life. [50]

I don't believe I can think of any other spy-thriller protagonist who shits himself when tortured, but presumably it happens more often than not, in, ahem, 'reality'. That S-shaped scar** has its part to play in the plot: one of Hillier's enemies, the obese pederast and international villain Mr Theodorescu, is able to see past Hillier’s cover-story (that he is a typewriter salesman called Jagger) by observing it, after Theodorescu seductive sidekick, Miss Devi, has tempted Hillier into nakedness. During their elaborately, if rather bafflingly described, coitus—

the nipples were rivets boring through the middle metacarpal bones. His soreness first cooled then anointed by the heat of a beneficent hell that (Dante was right) found its location at the earth’s core. He worked slowly, then faster, and let the cries of birds possess his ears—gannet, cormorant, bitten, ibis, spoonbill, flamingo, curassow, quail, rail, coot, trumpeter, bustard, plover, avocet, oystercatcher, curlew, oriole, crossbill, finch, shrike, godwit, wheatear, bluethroat. The cries condensed to a great roar of blood. The cabin soared, its ceiling blew off in the stratosphere

—and so on: during, I say, this coitus, Miss Devi injects Hillier with a truth serum. When corpulent Theodorescu calls by, Hillier cannot help but tell him all the secrets of British Intelligence, which secrets are Mr T’s stock in trade. Theodorescu then decamps by helicopter, but not before informing the Soviet authorities that they may locate their spy by the S branded on his flank.

Hillier is on a cruise-ship, the improbably-named Polyolbion, chugging around the Med. Under his Jagger-pseudonym he is on his way to Soviet Yugoslavia to retrieve (drugging him if needful) a prominent British scientist called Roper who has previously defected. It so happens that Hillier and Roper were at school together, a Catholic academy; and there's a great deal of 'Catholic' stuff in the earlier portions of the book. We discover that adult Hillier effectively broke-up the owlish Roper's marriage to a German woman called Brigitte, a luscious blonde who was working as a prostitute on the side whilst still married to Roper. After throwing out one of Brigitte's clients from the Roper domicile, Hillier had sex with Brigitte himself. Afterwards Roper flees to the USSR. Now Hillier must fetch him back.

Burgess's strategy when it comes to deconstructing the spy story is not to peddle cod-realism, nor to stress the downbeat and unexciting, but rather to push all the familiar elements into a kind of excess, by turns phantasmagoric and revolting. The things that 'sold' the Bond novels to readers living in the grey postwar world was fourfold, viz.:

• Sex
• Violence
• Exotic locales
• Food

It's easy to forget how titillating the latter two were liable to be for readers, in a world in which rationing cast a postwar shadow many years long, and when package holidays and gap years were mere glints in futurity's eye. But Fleming's books are full of all four, filtered through the snobbish sensibility of someone who (exciting!) takes all of them as nothing more than his due.

Burgess pushes each to parodic extremes. The lengthy, surreally-rendered shag shared by Hillier and Miss Devi, quoted (very partially) above, is one example. The second quantity is rendered via a series of positively Jacobean textual excrescences: Hillier finally tracks Roper down only to be double-crossed by an assasin, who monologues for many pages before being shot by a teenage boy called Alan, and we get:

He thudded fire at the nose and got the right eye. The eye leaped out on its string as in a surrealistic montage. The socket leered as blood prepared to charge and then the whole face was black fluidity mounted on a falling body. The mouth, independent of the smashed brain, cried 'Cor' in Cockney. [144]

But it's the food where Burgess really goes to town, partly in straightforwardly pastiched Fleming-asides ('He ate some boned veal loins en croûte with a noddle soufflé and julienne of young carrots and celery. He drank a '49 Margaux' [94]), but mostly in an queasy-making extended set-piece early in the novel, where fat Theodorescu bets thin Hillier £1000 that he can out-eat him. The result is a staggering scene of gormandizing excess that Hillier, of course, loses.

But the whole novel feels like that scene, in a way; Burgess bends all his considerable stylistic skill to disguise the fatty, sugaryness of the food, and then stuffs it down our craws immoderately. What, we can't help wondering, is he getting at? It seems to be that the wages of sensual indulgence is anticlimax. It leaches into the descriptive prose too: 'the marine sky insinuated itself. through phases of pink and madder, into a velvet transformation'. Often the novel's tone splurges: for splurge is the proper idiom of excess, and excess is one of the novel's main thrusts. The question is: does Burgess bodge the tone by this splurging? Does he engage in (you'll have to forgive me this one) tone burge?

Some people think so. My reaction to the novel was by no means as hostile as Damien Weaver's entertaining hatchet job, published on Bookslut a few years back; but there's something in what Weaver says:

It's like a TV series that runs for too many seasons; we watch the characters undergo so much and variously embody so much that it becomes impossible to take empathize with them or take them seriously as real people with recognizable lives. The characters in Tremor speak openly of the process, further diluting its impact. When the novel's characters show less and less interest in daily living, instead discussing the strange shared journey they're undergoing and the strange ways they're behaving, the reader may wish Puppeteer Burgess would quit flaunting the strings. ... With so many terrible writers writing so poorly it seems perverse to denigrate Tremor, which consists of a good writer by and large writing well, but the classification "satire" does not excuse ungainliness, authorial sloppiness does not render satire "rollicking," and the half-assed trappings of genre convention don't qualify a book as "deconstructive," "subversive," or "genre-busting." Still, those who've suffered through more egregious examples of the above—by, say, Andre Codrescu or Kinky Friedman—and wondered what the fuck the author was thinking may be reassured to discover such drivel has provenance, or at least a milder precedent.

During the interminable monologue of the paid assassin Wriste (whose previous cover was a cockney steward on the Polyolbion) Hillier notes his fondness for lecturing his victims. Theodorescu is prone to the same habit. 'There was, thought Hiller, always something of the schoolmaster in the secret agent' [136]. Really? It's as if to say: see, the spy-story puts us to school. But what is its lesson? 'Everything's an imposture' [199] is Hillier's gloomy conclusion at the novel's end. Everything? Isn't there anything hidden in amongst the misdirection, anything except flimflam? What though?

:3:

A brief coda on codes. They're part of the spy's armoury, of course; and the Da Vinci Code showed how commercially popular they can be in a popular-fictive context. Tremor of Intent is full of them. On board the Polyolbion Hillier receives a communication from base:

He opened the letter. It was, as he'd expected, in code: ZZWM DDHGEM EH IJNZ OJNMU ODWI EXWI OVU ODVP—Long, quite a long message. Hillier frowned. He had no way of breaking the code. Nothing had been said to him about the sending of messages after embarkation ... inside [the envelope], previously unnoticed by him, was the thinnest slip of paper, hardly bigger than a cracker motto. On it a rhyme had been typed:

November goddess in your glory
Swell the march of England's story.

And underneath a cheery message: regards from all here. [54-55]

Hillier pockets this, unsolved. Later in the story, precocious teenager Alan has a go:

'The November goddess is Queen Elizabeth I. She came to the throne in November 1558 ... alternate letters belong to alternate systems, yes. In one system the first letter is the fifth, in the other the fifth letter is the eighth. ... It begins: DEAR HILLIR. [107]

'They may have spelled it wrong,' says Hillier. 'It should be Hillier.' Burgess, sportingly, leaves the rest as an exercise for the reader: 'I didn't get much further that that,' says Alan. 'But it's full of apologies as far as I can see. They're sorry about something or other' [108]. What about the other codes? Look again at the list of birds in the Hillier/Devi sex scene, quoted above, the passage beginning 'gannet, cormorant, bitten ...' What do we make of their initial letters? G C B I S F C Q R C T B P A O C O C F S G W B. Best I can manage it, via an apostolic 12-letter substitution that shuffles certain groups of three around quasianagrammatically, is: S O N O V E R G O D F O R G I V E O U R S I N. What about the strange dream Hillier has, sharing a bunk with toothsome 16-year-old Clara prior to initiating her into the ways of the 'phallic experience' [171]? In dreamland he 'disentangled Virtue Prevails and Love and Fidelity to Our Country and Faithful out of the florid Byzantine cryptograms. Then the letters all snaked up again and the meanings were lost. Instead of his member there came along his chief and colleagues—RF, VT, JBW, LJ. Hue and Cry' [171]. You want to have a stab at that one yourself, maybe?

And the novel's title? A tremor of intent, or 'intention tremor', is a symptom of neurological degradation, sometimes associated with over-drinking. In You've Had Your Time Burgess recalls having a trembling hand one morning, and his alcoholic wife telling him, not without satisfaction: that's a tremor of intent, that is. What's the meaning here, though? Hillier ends up living in Ireland, and the last scene of the novel has him taking Clara and Alan out for champagne cocktails. He is wearing a dog-collar, a priestly disguise that may be more than mere impersonation. He is, after all, aging; his life seems celibate ('his bed would be cold and lonely that night') and he discourses on the cosmic battles of God and Notgod to the youngsters. 'You're a priest,' wondered Clara. [199] 'We'll have a good dinner,' Alan insists. 'On me. With champagne.' 'Lovely,' says Clara. And Hillier wraps up the novel with: '"Amen," said Father Hillier' [200]. It's a backward progress, perhaps, but codes often work backwards. And what word is hidden there in plain view, on the cover of the novel, reversed and cached in TREMOR OF? Flanked by the citadel word fort, no less?

ROME, of course.

--
** Hillier's S-shaped scar is an allusion to Fleming's novel, Casino Royale (1953), in which Bond is branded on the hand by Smersh with a Cyrillic Ш' (sh) to indicate SHpion, spy. This rather inconvenient cainmark is quietly forgotten in the later books and in the films. Burgess's memory, evidently, was more tenacious.

The Rock: A Vision of Battlements (1965)

This (its preface makes a point of informing the reader) was the first novel Burgess wrote, all the way back in 1949 according to the author's note here, or all the way back in 1953, according to the account in Little Wilson and Big God. Pays yer money, takes your choice. It was shelved until he hit his lean patch in the mid-60s. You've Had Your Time describes him at that time as distracted from the writing of proper novels by journalism and TV work; presumably he was also pretty fagged out from writing six novels, three of them masterpieces, over a ridiculously short timescale in the first years of the decade. Plus his wife was dying. At any rate, he filled the gap by pulling two dusty manuscripts from the drawer, and they were both published with illustrations by Edward Pagram: the lightweight Eve of Saint Venus, which was issued in 1964; and this one, in 65. Year of my birth, no less.

As for the making of it, Burgess explained it came at a time when he still liked to think of himself as a composer of music. He hit a fallow period, sonically speaking, in the late 40s: 'I was empty of music but itching to create. So I wrote this novel...to see if I could clear my head of the dead weight of Gibraltar.' The novel fictionalises Burgess's military service in the British territory.

Picking it up, I'll confess that my expectations were not high. I knew that it takes a satirical antiheroic posture by layering the adventures of the Burgess p.o.v. character 'Richard Ennis' over the formal and thematic foundations of the Aeneid. Doing so almost advertises the almost inevitable dying-fall of its ambition, right there: as if Burgess is saying 'Ulysses is one of my holy books, and that's based on the Odyssey. From Golden Age Homer to Silver Age Vergil, I'll write my own sub-Ulysses and base it on the Aeneid, which will have the added advantage of wending its perigrinating hero Rome-wards, important for a lapsed Catholic such as myself, rather than just have him dallying about Dublin.'

Actually, the book is much better than that rather snide summary implies. It is, for one thing, very well written, so much so that it's hard to avoid the suspicion that Burgess titivated it before its mid-60s publication date. Maybe not: maybe he just wrote this well straight out of the gate. Envy-provoking if so; but there you are. The characters are vivid and believable, the milieu nicely evoked, the prose is expertly calibrated and above all it's often very funny. A scene near the end, when Ennis giving a lecture to disgruntled troops, inadvertently fires them up to mutiny, such that everything he says only spurs them on (he tells them to 'go home', meaning back to barracks, and they, thinking he's inciting them to desert to Blighty, cheer him all the louder) has a beautiful Life of Brian avant-la-lettre quality. Ennis' best friend is a gay character called Julian—a suspiciously Round the Horne name for a gay character in a novel supposedly written in 1949, I'd say—who is pitched somewhere between screaming queen stereotype and actual, sympathetic human individual.

There's a lot of sex in the novel, and sex is where the novel sometimes swerves into slightly gaucher territory, which in turns tends to place the book as tyro work. Ennis, married, has an affair with a young Gibraltese widow called Concepción (the novel's version of Dido), and when she remarries a Spanish businessman he pursues a coolly beautiful WREN called Lavinia. Mostly, though, his life is defined by sexual frustration, and whilst that's pretty well drawn the writing about the actual shagging sometimes jars. Here he is kissing Lavinia:

But he kissed her again, and now his blood began to flow downwards, feeding a speedy tumescence. [119]

Feeding/speedy is a distracting half-rhyme in this context, and 'Speedy Tumescence' sounds like he ought to be Speedy Gonzales' randy cousin. Here's his first actual shag with Lavinia:

At the too-close approach of his own scalding crux, he felt her cry of an accepted ultimate covenant, was aware of the opening of the door. He sweated with a shock of incredulity and his heart began to sink rapidly as the flaccid cold of failure crept towards him. He kissed her hot face in an agony of humiliation. [135]

Puzzlingly phrased. I assumed: premature ejaculation. But later events make it plain that he simply loses his erection. At any rate Lavinia leaves in disdain, and you wouldn't blame a reader for following through on the same impulse. 'Scalding crux' is surely something for which medical attention ought immediately to be sought.

This crashing over-writing is not typical of the book as a whole, though; and although much of it by weight (as it were) concerns sex, it's not really 'about' sex. It's about marriage, and the impossibilities thereof. Ennis wonders in a more-or-less agonized manner whether he has fallen in love with Concepción: he hasn't, it's all lust. But he doesn't spare her his agonizing. Should he leave his wife and marry her? He can't though. He's Catholic. Sorry my dear. 'This is what I hate!' she rages, in her fluent English. 'You'll do this [the shagging, that is] and this is a sin, and we're both damned for it. And you don't go to mass, you haven't been to confession for sixteen years ... yet you argue so smooth to those others about God. It's all lies.' [22]

The novel is very closely autobiographical—at least if the account of Burgess’s time in Gibraltar in Little Wilson and Big God is to be believed. Of course, it’s possible that Burgess drew on the novel when writing the memoir (whole passages are word-for-word identical) which would put the issue of inspiration and record in interestingly complicated relationship. Ennis is, like AB, a would-be composer, and a good chunk of the novel concerns his musical ambitions. More directly relevant is the way Burgess's memoir records the ways in which he proved capable of surprising himself. Ordered to lecture on 'the British way' to Italian POWs, he instead read them Dante, and afterwards quarreled with his commanding officer. 'I was rebuked by Major Meldrum for not teaching the British Way and Purpose. It used to be, I cried hotly, the bloody European Way and Purpose until the bloody English permitted a stupid randy monarch to introduce what was later called the Reformation' [LWBG. 308]. What follows is the most intriguing part:

The outburst later I found interesting. I had assumed that I had freed myself from the nets of Catholicism, but here I was speaking out for Catholic Europe. Of course I was in Catholic Europe, despite the bobbies in British helmets ... I was drawn to the women with crosses hanging from their delectable necks. The Protestant Lynne was sick and far. I was in warm garlicky unreformed Christendom. [LWBG, 308]

This comes strongly through in A Vision of Battlements: sexual guilt, a character hating himself for his weakness and betrayals even as he rehearses his justifications and existential freedom. And beyond it all: God. 'As for God,' Burgess recalls of his Gibraltar days: 'there was God, towering high overhead, the mists of the Levant on his brow. I walked all over God, bearing the official Pelagian message' [LWBG, 308].

It's this, I think, that makes the conceptual Aeneid-ic scaffold less intrusive in the novel than it might have been. Ennis (‘Aeneas’) is exiled from his home, although instead of voyaging around the Mediterranean he drifts up and down Gibraltar. As Leo Bloom is to Odysseus, he is a deliberately low-rent, undignified figure: no pius father of his people he, but a sour, resentful underachiever, emotionally and artistically immature. Thoroughly unlikeable, indeed. Actually, I find Aeneas pretty unlikeable too, but for different reasons. One thing Burgess does that Joyce didn’t is nominally to over-determine his characters: Bloom and Stephen, as names, have only the loosest connection to Odysseus and Telemachus, but Ennis/Aeneas comes into conflict with the muscular ‘Turner’ (Turnus) over a woman actually called Lavinia. Burgess does this, I think, in order to wrongfoot his reader. Knowing the story, we expect Ennis to defeat Turner, which he does; but we also expect him to cop-off with Lavinia (which he doesn’t). The journey to the underworld happens not in the middle (Aeneid book 6 of 12) but right at the end. There is no Pallas figure, and unlike the heroic Aeneas Ennis ends his story as a failure on every level. The advantage of this, I suppose, is that it keeps the novel alive. Instead of running down the predictable grooves of Aeneallegory. The reader is never quite sure what is going to happen next.

Still, it has interesting consequences. The Odyssey is a poem about returning to a happy past, oriented towards nostos and the most acutely, literally nostalgic text ever composed. The Aeneid is a very different poem, oriented solidly towards the future. It is a poem about leaving the dead past and starting afresh, founding a new nation, seizing the future with both hands. In the poem ‘the future’ has a name and that name is ‘Rome’. Book 6 includes a lengthy, detailed prophetic vision of Rome’s future glory; books 7-12 detail the battles fought on the foundational site of the future city. A Vision of Battlements is decidedly more the former than the latter kind of text. It touches, only briefly and with familiar Burgessian disdain, on the post-1945 future as a denatured, hygienic dystopia ('A cult of young hooliganism. State art. Free ill-health for all' [186]). But it dwells endlessly, painfully and (in the end) without resolution on the past. Ennis is not only not pater patriae, he’s barely filius patriae; ordered to lecture the troops on ‘British values’ he is dismissive, sardonic, liable to break off and play Beethoven on the piano.

His marriage depends upon Ennis getting a post-war job in Gibraltar: his wife, back in the UK, is sick of the weather and wants sunshine and new horizons. For much of the novel it looks as though Ennis will be able to pull this off, but a series of comic misadventures stymie his chances. He won’t be staying on the rock. His disappointed wife accordingly leaves him to fly to the USA with a handsome American officer. In other words: the fate of the protagonist’s marriage is explicitly tied to it being located on the rock. But of course it is; as Burgess says in his memoir, the rock is Peter; is the first Pope; is the Catholic Church.

Lavinia is rather more attracted to handsome, muscular Turner than to Ennis, to the latter's chagrin. He gets revenge on the other man by spiking his orange juice with copious alcohol; the teetotal Turner makes a fool of himself and suffers a vast hangover. As a result he and his muscular cronies come after Ennis to beat him up. Ennis runs away, motorcycling to the top of the Rock.

He slowed down, braked, switched off his engine. The pursuing roars were dying down, now. He could see only their headlights shining from the other side of the jutting buttress. Rock. It was just rock. What was the Rock made of? That was a geological matter. There were so many things one didn't know. [161]

But one of the things the Rock is made of is: retribution for sin. His pursuers catch him: 'the avenging what-you-calls. Furies.'

"Just one good bloody punch on the jaw," said Turner. "One from each of us. That will do. But first we'll see him grovel." ...

"Look," said Ennis. "Let me warn you. Don't try anything here. It's highly dangerous. Look how high up we are. Look at all those lights down there. If you want to beat me up come and do it in the Nissen hut over there. Much more comfortable."

"Kneel down, Ennis,' said Turner. "Pray for forgiveness."

Ennis knelt obediently. As well now as later. He prayed aloud: "O my God, I am sorry and beg pardon for all my sins and detest them above all things—"

"Bloody mockery," said one of the sergeants. "Give it him now." [161]

His prayer, though, is answered. He lurches away from Turner's punch and the big man overbalances:

He tried to restore balance. It was like acrobatic comedy. One of the sergeants thought it was that and laughed. Turner fumbled for a hold, saying "Sod it." His hands wildly played a few rhapsodic bars on the piano of the air between himself and the rockface. Then he did a sort of dance on one leg, wildly pressing at a sort of sustaining pedal with it. "Oh Christ," he said ... Then he went over the side howling. [162]

Dead. The musical analogy is well judged here: funny in a ghastly sort of way. But since Burgess's Ennis is characterised by his guilt, this episode does not end the text, as it did in Vergil. Instead it leads into the visit to the Underworld: a trip over the border into Spain. Here Julian and Ennis hire a couple of whores and Burgess ramps up the sexual disgust: 'a lecherous urge led him to embrace the pallid matronal whore, thrusting a hand down her décolletage. A fat spongy ample palmful, knobbed as by a wart' [175]. Alright already! Guilt has curdled your pleasure in sex! We get it! The climax comes when Ennis discovers that Concepción has died giving birth to (it is strongly implied) Ennis's own son, also dead. Death everywhere.

In Little Wilson and Big God, Burgess reports attending a 1969 lecture on this novel 'at the University of Chapel Hill in North Carolina' given by 'a brilliant young professor named Tom Stumpf'. Google returns only a later pianist for this gentleman, though I'm not here to doubt the existence of such an academic, nor even his brilliance.

Stumpf pointed out what I had not previously noticed—that the name R. ENNIS spells SINNER backwards. This was a shock to me, reminding me that one is often less in control of one's work than one thinks. [LWBG, 364]

He goes on to summarise Stumpf's reading of the novel, assessing it a 'just' one: a story 'about authority, the factitious kinds represented by art or military organisation, the real kind represented by the Rock or the Church or God'. As to whether Burgess was really unaware of his backwards SINNER name-game, we are entitled to our doubts. Actually I suspect that AB's intent was more scatological, and 'Ennis' was as far along the road from Aeneas to 'Anus' as he thought he'd get away with. His character is, in many ways, an arsehole. But from the perspective of God, we're all arseholes, which is to say sinners. 'God in a lavatory!' swears a belligerent Spaniard, infuriated at Ennis. 'I shit myself on your father!' [172]. The real question is whether we are capable of processing our bad experiences, expelling them and so moving on, as true anuses are. 'I must learn to grow up,' says Ennis, at the novel's end. 'I can't put it off much longer' [186]. The novel leaves open at least the possibility that he manages this.

Language Made Plain (1964, rev. ed 1975)

Burgess's textbook on language, phonetics and linguistics manages to be both briskly informative and also packed with QI-style interesting facts and observations. Mind you, the first edition cover, up there, is an image of rare ghastliness, as the eyeless man with the revolting skin condition flaps his hideous lips in a fruitless attempt to eat the words LANGUAGE MADE PLAIN. The stuff of nightmare. So I'm glad to report I read it in the updated 1975 ed, with this cover:

A touch clever-clever, perhaps, but a huge improvement. For reasons unrelated to Burgess, and which he would probably have despised, it makes me think the maid is called Virginia, on account of the whole "MAID/What's her name?/Virginia PLANE" thing. But that's by the bye. In the 'Preface to the Second Edition' he notes that he has corrected 'all the errors I could find', including those 'derived from my own carelessness and stupidity, and I do not doubt that there are still traces of these not totally liquidable human qualities', which is nicely put. He also says he has taken out what were, in 1964, topical references to 'Khrushchev, John F Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson' and the like, since they have become dated, 'though Khrushchev is too phonemically interesting a name to discard'. I'll come back to that.

Anyway: there's little point in giving a detailed account of this book, which works logically through ten chapters on phonology and general linguistics, and then through nine more of 'Languages in Particular'. I only note a couple of moments that leapt up and tugged at my metaphorical lapels. For example, here is Burgess on the importance of buying good dictionaries. Should we be thinking of obtaining a foreign language dictionary, he says, it should ‘give pronunciation in the symbols of the IPA’.

It is a waste of money to buy some match-box sized amateurish lexicon which gives ‘approximate’ pronunciations of ordinary English orthography—like kaffay for café or bam-bee-noh for bambino. The French-English dictionary I possess cost rather more than a bottle of gin, but it is worth spending money on a professional performance. [67]

‘Costs rather more than a bottle of gin’ will from this moment on become my go-to phrase for indicating expense as an index of quality.

The ancient Hebrews found the consonants earthy and the vowels heavenly, and they never allowed the latter to come down to earth and be represented alphabetically. [35]

Is that really why Ancient Hebrew has no vowels? I have my doubts. The same is true of written Greek, after all; indeed, it was a common feature of Middle Eastern ur-alphabets. A pretty story, mind. Here he is on ‘foreign importations’ into English:

The Blitz of Blitzkrieg lost its native meaning of ‘lightning’ and now carries connotations of wanton destruction and massive bravery. ‘Beatnik’—a hybrid of American-Jewish origin—meant a member of a group devoted to pacifism and self-denial, but it quickly became as contemptuous a term as ‘teddy-boy’ (itself an example of pejorative change). Conversely ‘spiv’—which had a brief currency just after the war with a cluster of bad meanings—was taken over by the French as an adjective: trés spiv, as applied to a garment, meant ‘stylish’, a good example of ameliorative change. The Malay word pĕrang, meaning ‘war’, passed into RAF usage with the particularised meaning of an attack, usually a ‘wizard’ one. [108-09]

I don’t think this last example is right, actually: a prang is surely a crash or collision, not an attack.

As with many books of this sort, there is huge incidental pleasure in the inadvertent (or perhaps more designed) poetry of the examples presented for purely technical display, as in this nice piece of social paranoia coined by Burgess to illustrate the nine different dipthongs in English:

FEAR THE POOR OUTSIDE THE DOOR. BEWARE OF POWER; AVOID DESIRE. [31]

Good advice. And I liked this wonderfully banal short-story formed by Burgess making the point that in English 'the colourless word "get" can, in combination with various helper-words, do a remarkable number of jobs'

I got to bed late but got up quite early, got my clothes on, got some breakfast, got on the bus and got to the office on time. I got my ledgers out and got down to work, got a cup of coffee at eleven and got out to lunch at twelve-thirty. (I always get a good cheap lunch in the ABC) I got back to the office at two and got away at five-thirty, got home safely, got my tea, then got out to the pub as quickly as possible: some friends and I were having a get-together. [191]

It's like the wonderful middle-eight of the Beatles' 'Day in the Life'. Burgess would not have thanked me for that comparison.

And Khrushchev? Burgess uses the name to point up Russian letters we don't have in English: 'you practice,' he instricts us, 'on "smashed china" for the shch-sound (щ in the Russian alphabet)' in the middle of his name [35]. And then later to show the 'suitability of Russian for the language it clothes', since 'Romanisation only makes Russian look clumsy.' He offers the comparison:

     Хрущёв

Kh r u shch e v

So there we go.

Nothing-Will, Come Of Nothing: Nothing Like The Sun (1964)

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Nothing Like The Sun is a modest-enough title, when you come to think about it. Burgess means: his pastiche Shakespeareanisms (from the stream-of-consciousness account of the inside of WS’s head to whole new sonnets gorblimeyed up out of the proper Elizabethan idiom) is not a patch on the original. How could it be? Of course, he folds other meanings into his title. O (nothing; the letter; the round of the Globe theatre) proves but a pale imitation of the Platonic reality of illumination. And the nothing is Shakespeare, too: the ungentle, non-aristocrat Shakespeare: ‘But I am a mere nothing,’ he says to the Earl of Southampton, prior to shagging him [108]. What is it (to appropriate Lear's words) that 'comes' of this particular nothing? Comes has a sexual double-meaning, you know. Oh, you did know? Excellent.

Then again, we might object that Burgess’s rich stylistic Shakespeare-via-Joyce is something like the sun, or there’d be no point in us reading it. The novel was published for the tetracentenary of Shakespeare's birth in 1964, part of a year of general celebration, and it evidently seeks to put (as the phrase goes) clear blue water between itself and the more piously stodgy establishment encomia. This is a deliberately disreputable Shakespeare; randily bisexual, not well liked by his fellow players, physically unprepossessing (especially at the end, as syphilis increasingly raddles him). An insecure Shakespeare. It's also a young Shakespeare: apart from a brief, almost hallucinatory epilogue, it only takes us up to 1599, but Burgess has that covered. The novel's subtitle tells us it's a (pointedly, not the) 'Story of Shakespeare's Love-life'; and by the seventeenth-century the syphilis has put the old in-out, in-out behind him. Indeed, it's asserted in the epilogue that this disease is responsible for the uncategorizable genius of late Shakespeare, and is moreover perhaps the dark secret at the centre of all truly great art. And at this point in the blogpost, to break up the monotony of bald text some, I'm going to insert an engraving of J. van der Straet's 'A man in bed suffering from syphilis, amidst a busy domestic scene' (1590):

The novel is also about the ‘dark lady of the Sonnets, here styled as a dark-skinned beauty called Fatimah, and whose eyes, as Sonnet 130 from which the title is quoted, are dark, not light. Her 'nothing' (her vagina, that is) is solar, warm, evocative of the sunny climes from whence she comes; and there's much wordplay in the novel to do with lady-parts, as with the penile pun on 'Will' so common in the Sonnets. Fatimah is in the Sonnets too, according to Burgess: encoded acrostically into Sonnet 147, which in turn serves as epigraph to the novel:

My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
Th’uncertain sickly appetite to please.
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I, desperate, now approve
Desire is death, which physic did except.

(In You've Had Your Time Burgess suggests that 'the first two vowels are suppressed in the Arabic manner', which doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Why, then, include the last 'A'? Why suppress vowels anyway? Mightn't we prefer to think that the spelling Shakespeare encodes here is Fe/Thu/M/A/H or 'Fethumah'? Same name, plausible-enough Elizabethan orthography.) Anyway. Not to get distracted. The more relevant point, though, is that this sonnet easily lends itself to a reading by which Shakespeare feverishly regrets that he has caught a sexually transmitted disease from his Dark Lady. An added irony, of which Burgess is certainly aware, is that the Arabic fāṭima means abstainer, or celibate person.

Nothing Like The Sun starts with Fatimah, in the early chapters, as a sort of prophetic vision of oriental loveliness. Young Shakespeare has vividly proleptic dreams about her. The opening sentence of the book evokes her: ‘it was all the matter of a Goddess—dark, hidden, deadly, horribly desirable. When did her image first dawn?’ And here's the novel's second paragraph, a characteristic chunk of the novel's style, in the lady is again hidden, via 'f' and 'fa' words and two emphatic repetitions of the last syllable of Fatimah's name:

A Good Friday, sure. ’77? ’78? ’79? WS, stripling, in worn tight doublet, patched cloak, but gloves very new. Beardless, the down on his cheek golden in the sun, the hair auburn, the eyes a spaniel’s eyes. He kicked in youth’s peevishness at the turves of the Avon’s left bank, marking with storing-up spaniel’s eye the spurgeoning of the back-eddy under the Clopton Bridge. (Clopton, the New Place hero, who had run away to get rich. Would he, WS, die as great a Stratford’s son?) He smarted to be treated as a child still, he and the family idiot Gilbert charged to take young Anne and younger Richard on a glove-delivering walk in the healthful air. Air blue and sweet over the greenery where the hares darted, away from Henley Street’s dunghills, the butchers sharpening their knives and sorting their pricks and making ready for Easter-Eve market. Young beasts dying maaaaaaa for fine appetites. Jack of Lent ready to be turned out of doors and belaboured. Sweet, hopeful air, sad with a mild south-westerly whisper of afternoon rain. Spring and, battering and belabouring his ears, the moans of another sort of beast—all white, all clawing fingers froglegs swimming on the bed, sepuchrally white. He had seen, that Maundy Thursday afternoon, dupping their chamber door in all maaaaaaa innocence. He should not have seen not heard. All that busy whiteness. They could not have known he saw. [3]

We’re entitled, if we choose, to dismiss this as modish (hence dated) stylistic showoffery; but if we don’t agree to the rules as we start-in, we can’t play the game at all. So if we're smart, we read with a sense of how the sport will be. Clues are dropped in, and we are expected to pick them up (his doublet is old and patched, but his gloves are new: because, we clever readers know, his Dad was a glover). The running theme is how observant WS is, how retentive is his memory. Later in this chapter WS meets a clapped-out ex-sailor, who drunkenly boasts of his travels: ‘I have tasted camel’s flesh and been to lands where men do eat men and have eyes set in their breasts’ [6], and we are versed-enough in Shakespeare to notice the resemblance to Othello’s tall tales wooing Desdemona. The conceit is, presumably, that WS stores it all up, and later reuses it. The danger is that this gives the book the flavour of a mashed-up and stewed Bartlett’s Dictionary of Famous Quotations, stitched together with descriptions of WS shagging and scratching at parchment with a quill pen. But I would suggest that this is a danger Burgess largely avoids. I'll come back to this point.

It's tempting to read Burgess’s habit of referring to our Will as ‘WS’ as a coded piece of self-referentiality: for Burgess's real surname has two syllables, the first of which begins with a ‘W’ and the second with an ‘S’. But we can forgive him that. This paragraph also sets up the Big Themes of death, sex, mothers (‘maaaaaaa’, twice) and memory: little Will shocked by the primal scene of his parents fucking, the repellent froggish whiteness of this as against the seductive darkness of Fatimah.

By the second chapter WS is in trouble for getting Alice Studley (‘one ready wench—black-eyed, the flue on her body black, her hair black and shining as blackbirds that fed on thrown-out bacon fat’) with child: but it might just as well have been Ben Lovell, or Gervase Black from Blockley, or Pip Graydon. In chapter 3 he is at home amongst bickering siblings and disdainful parents and respectable poverty, writing his first sonnet, Burgess's own stab at the kind of thing the young Will might have been scribbling:

Fair is as fair as fair itself allows,
And hiding in the dark is not less fair.
The married blackness of my mistress’ brows
Is thus fair’s home for fair abideth there.
My love being black, her beauty may not shine
And light so foiled to heart alone may turn.
Heat is my heart, my hearth, all earth is mine;
Heaven do I scorn when in such hell I burn.
All other beauty’s light I lightly rate.
My love is as my love is, for the dark.
In night enthroned, I ask no better state,
Than thus to range, nor seek a guiding spark.
And, childish, I am put to school of night
For to seek light beyond the reach of light.

Not very good, but (as per Enderby) perhaps not meant to be: Will is either 14 or 15 at this point, and callowness in versifying is to be expected. I can’t say it seems to me to have a very Shakespearian flavour: that triple repetition of ‘fair’ in line one, ‘heaven do I scorn’ too blasphemous a sentiment for the Sonnets and the final line is more Metaphysical (actually: more Wallace-Steveny, Empsonian, Modernist-mystical) than Elizabethan. But fair enough: a sonnet’s a sonnet. And the real purpose of this fourteen-liner is to point up the acrostic of the name of the Dark Lady, FATIMAH (first forwards then backwards). In You've Had Your Time Burgess crows a little, in a manner not entirely seemly, that 'not one reviewer spotted this improbable acrostic'. What he doesn't say, and conceivably didn't notice himself, is that the second half also includes a slyly skew acrostic for the name of Shakespeare's own son (lines 8-12, with an extra step past the subjective 'I' into line 11—since Hamnet was 11 when he died: 'Heaven', 'All' 'My' 'Night', 'Enthroned' 'Than'), the death of whom has such a major impact on Shakespeare in the novel. Followed by a conclusive 'A' and 'F' that, I'd like to think, links Anthony B. and Fatimah herself. Shakespeare, bereft into writing Hamlet by the death of Hamnet, finds some kind of balm in the news that Fatimah bore him a son who has since been taken into the East, and whose descendant Burgess might have encountered in his Malayan travels.

Functionally in terms of narrative, Burgess includes this early sonnet (and its improbably proleptic acrostic) to illustrate the process of composition. And actually that 14-lines is not what the novel prints. Instead, as his siblings and parents scrap and shout around him, the young Will writes, with many prose interruptions:

Fair is as fair as fair itself allows,
And hiding in the dark is not less fair.
The married blackness of my mistress’ brows
Is thus fair’s home for fair abideth there.
My love being black, her beauty may not shine
And light so foiled to heart alone may turn.
Heat is my heart, my hearth, all earth is mine;
Heaven do I scorn when in such hell I burn.
All other beauty’s light I lightly rate.
My love is as my love is, for the dark.
In night, on night, enthroned on night …
Enthroned on night I keep my something state.
In night enthroned, I ask no better state,
Twin-orbed and sceptered …,
Than thus to range, nor seek a guiding spark.
And childlike I am put to school of night
And, childish, I am put to school of night
For to seek light, for to seek light light light…
For to seek light beyond the reach of light.

This nineteen-line poem is rather better than the 'finished' piece, I think, qua poem.; though obviously is smears and obscures the second acrostic. It does, though, effect a Gertrude-Stein-y emphasis of certain key themes in the novel. Night. Light.

Still, my mistress's eyes are nothing like this sonnet. Will falls in love with dark-haired, pretty young Anne Whately, besotted (‘“Anne Anne Anne Anne,” the starlings scolded’ [32]); but it's too late. He has already made merry in the woodlands with older, blonde Anne Hathaway—thrice, no less—and she is with child. He has to marry her, and though there is a chapter of spicy sex-scenes, lest we forget that Burgess was also working on a screenplay around this time to be called ‘the Bawdy Bard’—Will discovers that though hate adds spice to shagging it’s no foundation for married life. He runs off: is cockstruck by a black prostitute in Bristol, works as Latin tutor to a nobleman’s twin sons until, having started a sexual relationship with one (at the boy’s instigation) he propositions the other accidentally and is chased out of the house.

Eventually he ends up in London, a poet and player, and here he has a long relationship with Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. He sees another, or perhaps the same (I wasn't sure) black woman around London and is again besotted. This is Fatimah, and in Burgess's version she is not Mediterranean, nor African, nor even Arabic. She is Malay: golden-coloured rather than coal-black, slender, flat-faced and full-lipped. Shakespeare records: 'She says (I write it on my tablet): Slammat jalan' [147], which is certainly Malay: 'Selamat jalan' /səlamat dʒalan/, 'Have a safe journey'. There's even quite a nice pun, later in the novel, when, having abandoned Shakespeare to become the mistress of the higher-ranking Earl of Southampton, Fatimah is cast off herself, and returns to him. Southampton, she says, is a tuan (Malay 'lord', as anyone who has read Conrad's Lord Jim knows very well). 'But it is you dat have de noble name,' Fatimah tells Shakespeare, 'not he, our tuan dat is gone to de war.' 'I?' Shakespeare replies, puzzled. 'I am not noble.' 'You are a sheikh,' she replies, simply. [209]

Ho ho.

Frank Kermode summarises the rest of the novel:

His affair with a dark lady ... is interrupted by the friend [Southampton], and the mixture of sexual disgust, longing, resignation and anger of the sonnets is projected onto the novel. While this painful affair is in progress Shakespeare’s son Hamnet dies in Stratford. Going home on this occasion to his grand new house, the biggest in the town, he discovers his wife and his brother in bed [note: actually Kermode is wrong here; it is not the funeral journey for Hamnet but a later trip that discloses this adultery to Will]; no great surprise to this roué Londoner, who by now knew, grimly enough, what one might expect of a woman. Anne’s infidelity is a great relief, and the poet rides back to London grateful for ‘that cornuted manumission’, an expression one likes to think only Burgess could have invented. The unequal friendship with Southampton is resumed, and Shakespeare dares to warn his friend against getting mixed up in the ambitions and plots of the rebellious Essex. He also returns to his lover and catches the disease from which the young Earl is already suffering. The book ends with a sort of dark Lawrentian fantasia on that disease as the source of all evil, and possibly the true source of the truth about this world.

Kermode quotes Sonnet 144, the last lines of which have been taken by some critics (though not most) to refer to Shakespeare's syphilis:

Two loves I have, of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still:
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman coloured ill.
To win me soon to hell, my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
Wooing his purity with her foul pride.
And whether that my angel be turned fiend
Suspect I may, yet not directly tell;
But being both from me, both to each friend,
I guess one angel in another’s hell.
Yet this shall I ne’er know, but live in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out.

The hell and fire images here may or may not refer to the burning of venereal infection; but Burgess takes the whole poem at, as it were, face value: the man right fair is Southampton, aristocratic and virtuous in the etymological, vir-sense of the word. Pleasure (the enjoyment of the woman's 'O', her nothing) leads to nothing, the hellish burning and the grave. All enjoyment ends there, and Burgess captures well the way later Shakespeare is so prone in his plays to rail against lechery, pleasure and unchaste women. The solar nothing leads, of course we know, to nothing.

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The least sympathetic account of this novel I have read comes from the usually more perceptive Colin Burrow. Burrow mislikes the novel very much, and cites it as part of an 'is Burgess truly a good writer or not?' debate he holds with himself. And actually, Burrow claims not to be sure whether Burgess is a good writer ('it [is] extremely hard to assess how good he is'). This doesn't stop him waxing very woe-unto-us-Sun-readers:

Geoffrey Grigson, in a review that Burgess seems to have learned by heart, said that his journalism was driven by a desire to convince himself that ‘an insatiable liking for words amounts to an ability to use them well and to distinct purpose.’ The look-at-me cleverness is certainly there throughout his fiction. His novel about Shakespeare, Nothing like the Sun (1964), is particularly full of misfiring bits of attention-seeking. When Will laments his sickness, while the ‘mobbled queen’ Elizabeth I is on progress, there is a classic piece of Burgessian talent abuse: ‘I can hardly move, sick not in my body but only in my soul, centre of my sinful earth. I lie on my unmade bed listening to time’s ruin, threats of Antichrist, new galleons on the sea, the queen’s grand climacteric, portents in the heavens, a horse eating its foal, ghosts gliding as on a buttered pavement.’ This is a terrible piece of writing, but not unrepresentative. The little glances at obvious bits of Shakespeare, from Hamlet, through The Rape of Lucrece and the Sonnets, make it seem as though Will thought only in Famous Quotations, and those Famous Quotations are syntactically redundant in a way that makes them audibly no more than add-ons. By the time the sentence arrives at the hideously un-Shakespearean ‘buttered pavement’ it is all too ready to slip over. The overlay of learning – misguided showing-off rather than postmodern self-consciousness – blows away any intimacy with Shakespeare. You wind up watching Burgess mechanically anatomising Shakespeare’s words.

This is hardly fair. Burgess does play the anticipatory-phraseology game a little in this book it's true; but to a much less degree than this quotation implies. Most of the narrative is quite bare of Famous Quotations, and concentrates on other effects: brilliantly evocative landscape and period detail; sharply observed dialogue (as ever in Burgess). Nor is it fair to quote the passage Burrow does here out of context. As it stands the butter-image looks just random. In situ, it comes at the end of a whole chapter describing a riot by London apprentices, venting their ire at butter-sellers 'for that they sell their butter at 2d the lb too much' [158]. This is Burgess's version of what happened in June 1595 when 'some young apprentices complained about the overprice in the market' and 'showed their complaint by taking 500 pounds of butter from the market women in Southwark after the price of butter which had the rate 3 pence per the pound, [was raised to] 5.' The unhistorical element here is  Burgess importing the rape of (we assume) Fatimah into these riots: 'in Clerkenwell they have beaten the negro trulls, stripping one and scrubbing her to clean off her black before using her foully.' This leads, in Shakespeare spirochete-addled mind to the nightmarish fantasia, where butter figures both as a referent to maternal milk (there's a whole thesis to be written about Burgess and milk in this context, actually) and to a greasier symbol of lustful pleasure, like curdled semen:

All this [riot] for 2d a lb on butter. Well, what was this agitation in the city of mine own soul but that? A finger-dip into butter-smooth pleasure and the armies and rioters trample through my veins, crying Kill kill. Buttered blood, the town is spread with it.

The passage Burrows quotes, following this, doesn't read so badly.

That's not to say that the novel is problem-free. There is something not quite resolved about the Malaysian origin of Fatimah. What I mean is: on the one hand, Burgess plays quite scrupulously with the 'clues' provided by the sonnets and plays, whilst accepting that such stuff is playful: writing is extrapolated back into a fictional 'life' in ways that do no great violence to plausibility. There were black prostitutes in Elizabethan London; the man who wrote Cleopatra understands something important about the erotic fascination of ethnic and cultural otherness; it's reasonable to think that something beyond the simply chronological process of growing older explains the sharp difference between the sexually lubricious young Shakespeare of Venus and Adonis and the feverishly physically-repelled anti-sex Shakespeare of the later plays.

That's all well and good, and within the terms of the game. But plausibility is going to suggest a North African or Mediterranean provenance for Fatimah (not least the Islamic name itself). Plausibility collapses, exhausted, before the premise of faraway Malaya supplying her to London in the 1590s. This, we understand, relates not to Will Shax but to Wil-son; it is Burgess's own life experience that elevates that particular place to imaginative centrality. And this in turn points to an unresolved tension in Nothing Like The Sun: there's a blink-and-miss-it frame narrative to the novel, in which 'Mr Burgess's farewell lecture to his special students' in Malaysia (they are named, 19 of them; and their Malay and Arabic names recur, in various word-game ways, in the body of the text) provides the occasion for the whole book.  The chasm between the two worlds is too great, and has the effect of destabilising a book that otherwise stands perfectly well as a 'straight' historical novel.

Straight is the wrong word, of course. Bisexual Shakespeare, the master-mistress of this whole enterprise, is sometimes represented via third and sometimes a first person narration. But my master-mistress's 'I's are nothing like Wil-son. Of course it's a false compare. Nor, I think, does Burgess ever suggest otherwise. The final words are Burgess more or less in propria persona, and they acknowledge his suzerainty to William. What would you have now? No more. No no no more. Never again. One last word. One last last last last word. My Lord.