Top 6 Burgess Books. Im reading an Anthony Burgess book at the moment and it got me thinking about my favourites. A Death in Deptford – The first Burgess book I ever read. It was discovered amongst some poetry collections whilst clearing a friend’s attic. I thought I’d give it a try as I was very interested in Elizabethan/Jacobean playwrights and Marlowe in particular (Shakespeare’s good but who were his less lauded contemporaries?!) and fell in love with the erudition of the novel. There were jokes in there: pretentious jokes about Catholicism and Protestantism (the original cold war that Kit Marlowe was probably embroiled in) and I’m sure a lot more gags than I actually understood. It was liberating to read something that didn’t ‘talk down to me’. Enderby – Is this a thinly disguised biography? A poet with no practical skills lives in squalor and grumpily complains at how mindless the world is whilst delighting in his own bloated, noisy and disrespectful body. I’m not sure there is a plot but there’s certainly a real three dimensional character here. Clockwork Orange – It’s a hard decision whether this is in my top five/six or not. A thin novella about whether niceness is more important than free-will (such a British theme!), Burgess grew to hate it. The writer’s ire was mainly due to this being the only book anyone knew of his… but it is so very good. The morals are subtle and alarming. The descriptions of youthful gangs and sociopathy are so believably written (by a middle-aged bloke who probably never directly experienced teen violence). Graham Green’s ‘Brighton Rock’ covers a similar subtext but I much prefer Burgess’s clever and horrible fable. Earthly Powers – This is similar to another of his books ‘Any Old Iron’ (a tale of the 20th century viewed from a family’s reactions to various events) and I was torn between that one and this one. This one has a strangely brutal and realistic Catholic priest at its centre and begins with a famous line about catamites (which is such a great word!). It almost won the Booker when it was published and was one of the books Burgess was most proud of. The Kingdom of the Wicked – Amongst all the angry voices proclaiming this religion or that religion (including atheism!) true or false, I sometimes forget what a great story there is in the New Testament of the Bible. What would a great writer do with a tale of the persecuted wanderings of Jesus’s apostles; left leaderless but convinced of their god-given purpose whilst living in a world ruled by a capricious and violent Emperor. Don’t worry; this is not preachy and requires neither belief nor knowledge of religion. It also is a wonderful companion for anyone who loves Robert Graves’ ‘I Claudius’ as it tells of the Jewish experience during the same timeframe. Translation of Cyrano De Bergerac – The Depardieu version of Cyrano De Bergerac is one of my favourite films of all time and one of the few I’ve seen at the cinema more than once. There are many good and practical reasons for learning French (including being able to talk to Cecile’s family at Christmas) but one of the romantically impractical ones is that I’d love to memorise Cyrano’s dying words when he rallies against the cruel world and says that whatever else he has lost, the thing that he is most proud of maintaining in his life is ‘mon panache’. Burgess manages to keep the rhyming scheme of the original and the jokes and the power of the language. I don’t know what compromises he had to make to do this, but his version is beautiful.
Posted on: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 07:27:46 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015