Ostentatiously inventive and original, his prose in novels like A Clockwork Orange or Nothing Like the Sun was not only delightful but dazzlingly effective. Burgess’s poetry was vastly inferior to his prose. Why shouldn’t a novelist also work in poetry or verse drama? In practice, however, the reader faced a serious problem.
In principle, one had to admire Burgess’s ambitious rejection of literary specialization. (Burgess filled his four Enderby novels with copious verses purportedly written by his maladroit protagonist.) Even his most popular comic character, the constipated F. He also repeatedly placed poets–Shakespeare, Marlowe, Keats–as the central figures in his novels. He published an epic poem and undertook half a dozen major verse translations ranging from Oedipus the King to Cyrano de Bergerac. Most novelists have a youthful fling with poetry before settling down sensibly with prose, but Burgess never lost his early passion. Many of his books have an experimental shape, but none is more boldly designed than Byrne, which unfolds in an entirely new form for Burgess–the verse novel. Completed shortly before his death in 1993, Byrne demonstrates that not only was Burgess’s artistry undiminished at the end but it was still growing. This new volume, however, is so fresh, funny, and inventive that it ranks among his finest creations. His best novels show such scope, intelligence, and extravagant originality that many readers share Gore Vidal’s assessment that Burgess was “easily the most interesting English writer in the last half century.”īurgess’s last novel, Byrne, is not, alas, the masterpiece that long eluded him. He left no magnum opus but scored nearly a dozen brilliant near-misses. Burgess lavishly spread his gifts across thirty-three novels of startling diversity. Some writers–like Ralph Ellison or Giuseppe di Lampedusa–labor endlessly to focus their full imagination into a single masterpiece.
Anthony Burgess was a novelist of indisputable genius who never published an indisputably great novel.
0 kommentar(er)
