Ending It All

There's something a bit odd about reading something by a major writer who happened to attend the same school as yourself. Much as I enjoy the works of Anthony Burgess the feeling of a peculiar familiarity generated by the fact that his feet trod at least some of the same corridors of academe as myself, though many years before mine, and that we shared the same teacher of History, something I only realised when reading the first volume of his autobiography Little Wilson and Big God, haunts my reading of pretty much everything by him. There's a connection also with the fact that he's one of those writers who never entirely loses himself in his work. You have an awareness when you read him, or at least I do, that this is Burgess putting on a performance, usually of a virtuoso nature. Storyline and characters are generally paper-thin, at the service of the writer being his larger-than-life self.

The novel I finished yesterday, The End Of The World News, proved to be no exception to this rule. Burgess calls it An Entertainment in a sub-heading, curious really since this would surely apply to nearly everything he writes. I suppose here it's a sort of apology for what was obviously a bit of a rush job of a novel. The three parts, a kind of memoir of Freud, a sort of Broadway musical version of Trotsky in America immediately prior to the revolution of 1917, and a self-referential bit of sci-fi dealing with the imminent end of the world neatly tied in with the then approaching millennium, have no right being thrust together in the pages of a single novel, and Burgess doesn't seem to have the energy to attempt a justification. But he has an abundance of energy for lots of other things and the jokes and insights keep coming thick and fast.

I enjoyed it all immensely, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone other than the most convinced fans.