Neglected No More

It’s good to see Vintage Classics, & equally good Beautiful Books, reissusing several books by Antony Burgess.  Whom is he, you may ask- well that’s precisley the reason I’m glad he’s getting back into print.  Terrible: he produces thirty-three novels (including a trilogy & a quartet), two volumes of poetry, three plays/musicals, one book of short stories, two children’s books, three volumes of journalism, three biographies, two studies of linguistics as well as all of the hundreds of difficult-to-classify words & the compositions of music all taken into account & he can only be remembered as Stanley Kubrick.  Prehaps the clockwork orange account was a pyrric misstep or maybe he should have removed the middle man & written the screenplay first.  Read it, preferably while learning Russian, & know how wrong that would be.  Firstly he is lingusitically alive like few novelists are or can be, no doubt due to his love of James Joyce & music.  In ‘A Clockwork Orange’ he fuses Russian with cockney rhyming slang to create Alex’s argot ‘Nadsat’, which Burgess’ skillfully ties in with his themes.  The Cryllic word for ‘good’ is said phonectically spelling it out as ‘horrorshow’.  Secondly he is intellectually enegetic.  In just over a hundred pages he deals with a topic no less weighter than the measuring up of choatic individual choices agaisnt state controlled social coherence.  Why is it this book that we misremember & not, let me suggest, ‘The Wanting Seed’, a book no less relavent, a book about the goverment promotion of homosexuality as a solution to overpopulation before turning to cannibalism & functional war.  Then there’s Enderby & all his other creations…

Among the books are Tremor of Intent, 1985, One Hand Clapping, The Maylan Trilogy (Time for a Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket, Beds in the East), A Dead Man in Depford, Earthly Powers.