[The American edition of A Clockwork Orange] contains no word whatsoever to inform its readers that the last chapter has been deleted…. (p. 21) My analysis of the technical-satiric patterns of the complete novel constitutes a low-keyed argument that the complete novel is superior to the truncated version….

The metaphor of the clockwork universe provides a useful touchstone for considering [some of Burgess's novels] …, and it is a motif extended and developed throughout his work; but Burgess has already beaten clock time as he has transcended national borders through fiction which constantly breaks beyond imposed and conventional thinking. (p. 3) Burgess doesn't "think that the job of literature is to teach us how to behave," but he does "think it can make clearer the ...

[For Anthony Burgess], as for Joyce, "The artist is a Promethean figure who ends by usurping the place of Zeus." Burgess writes in Re Joyce: "The fundamental purpose of any work of art is to impose order on the chaos of life as it comes to us; in imparting a vision of order the artist is doing what the religious teacher also does (this is one of the senses in which truth and beauty are the same thing)." It is not surprising that of twentieth-century fantasy writers Burgess most a...

[Burgess'] sensitivity to the comic potential of English is apparent throughout his novels, and presumably it was increased by his reading of Joyce. He does not use language, in precisely the same ways that Joyce does, but he makes it, along with situation and character, a principal vehicle of comedy. And, like Joyce,… he does not hesitate to go beyond English and devise a tongue suitable for his artistic purposes. The influence of Joyce can also be seen in the portraiture of several of his pr...

Mr. Burgess likes to portray the universe as a "duoverse," that is, a cluster of contending opposites which agitate against moderation. "The thing we're most aware of in life," he writes, "is the division, the conflict of opposites—good, evil; black, white; rich, poor—and so on." And since living in the center of this conflict is, to use Mr. Burgess's illustration, like trying to picnic in the middle of a football field, we gravitate natu...

In Burgess's view, the liberal's optimism, his belief in the fundamental goodness and perfectability of man, derives from an ancient heresy—the Pelagian denial of Original Sin. And not surprisingly, he feels that the doctrinal bases of much of the pessimism pervading western conservative thinking can be traced to Augustine's well known refutations of Pelagian doctrine. In view of the frequency of clashes between 'Augustinians' and 'Pelagians' in Burges...

[Anthony Burgess's] twenty-odd volumes of fiction range over vast immensities of time and space, and are full of flashy erudition and restless experiments with language and form. In one of his early novels, The Right to an Answer (1960), Burgess proved himself a mordantly funny satirist, expert at the outraged snarl against society that has been a staple of postwar British fiction and that reached comic perfection in the work of Kingsley Amis. In Davil of a State and the trilogy, The Long Day Wanes, ...

The phenomena of demonic possession and exorcism seem to be taken seriously in Anthony Burgess's new novel [Earthly Powers]. Has Burgess himself been possessed by a scribbling demon? More than 20 novels in as many years, together with more than 20 titles in a variety of other genres—the record suggests that some agency not quite human might have been at work. Demons traditionally speak in many tongues, as does the polyglot Burgess, who is also capable of making up languages of his own (A Clock...

The Burgess bibliography lists twenty-one novels. (There are rumors of esoterica under a pen name.) "The Long Day Wanes," an autobiographical trilogy set in Malaya, launched the Burgess canon. It remains perhaps his most poignant, unguarded performance. "A Clockwork Orange" brought celebrity when it was made into a striking movie. But the fiction is subtler than Stanley Kubrick's package and points to that in Burgess's politics and alertness to science-fiction which...

Burgess is a natural writer, if such an animal exists, but he is certainly no struggler. Throughout his career he has been all too content to let his undeniable talents as a wordsmith, and his not inconsiderable erudition, carry more than their fair share of the artistic burden. That is a great pity since Burgess, a Joyce scholar and a writer almost painfully attuned to the possibilities of language in modern fiction, is superbly equipped to undertake a really major work. His apparent unwillingness to do th...

Anthony Burgess' Ernest Hemingway and His World is trying to be an attractive (there are over a hundred photographs) summary of Hemingway's life. Yet there is more to writing a biography, even one as short as this, than merely mixing facts and anecdotes with occasional off-hand interpretations. Burgess' central theme is that "Hemingway the man was as much a creation as his books, and a far inferior creation." While this is an interesting thesis, Burgess never argues it. Ev...

A book by Anthony Burgess, fictional or otherwise (and ABBA ABBA is both), is likely to be tricky—and harsh almost to desperation, moving and funny. Also, at times, exasperating: over-insistence and the obvious are a word-player's fatal Cleopatras, sure to engulf him in the mire of horseplay, yet irresistible through their very unattractiveness, perhaps. Part One is a tale about Keats, dying in Rome, in the care of his friend, Severn. Word-play starts in the title and proliferates speedily. Th...

Historical fiction? Biography? Poetic theory? Translation? Spoofs and fakes (if there is such a category)? [Abba Abba] is an entertaining and thought-provoking production (let us play safe), based on the rather nice speculative idea that John Keats might have met, during the last months of his life in Rome, the Roman dialect poet Giuseppe Belli. The first half of the book describes this imaginary encounter and how it might have affected both writers…. Keats himself, in a not unsympathetic but not who...

              [Moses] swings along rather well,Genial, slack verse that is easy to read,The rhythms loose and ambulatory,  The line lengths uneven,  The language now formal, now colloquial,  Echoes of the Bible mingling with knowing modern diagnosis,  Hesitant about miracles, but coming down on their side in the end,...

[There] is evidence of imaginative energy in "Man of Nazareth." If the book's portrait of Salome seems a shade lubricous and overelaborate, the portrait of Judas Iscariot (political innocent cynically used by the Establishment) is cunning and provocative. And genuine liveliness breathes in the disciples' often coarse talk among themselves. "I touched him," says Thomas after the Resurrection, "and then he gave me this mouthful about it being better to believe ...