The End of the World News
Burgess, Anthony
THE END OF THE WORLD NEWS Anthony Burgess / McGraw-Hill Book Co.V $15.95 Reid Buckley I was first steered to Anthony Burgess back in the 1960s. He had been at the writer's trade a few years only,...
...They rescued him without much trouble...
...The second storyline...
...Mussolini's body, after long and secret peregrinations,* came finally to rest in a modest grave in the village where he was born, among the people that he loved, albeit with a selfish passion, in the Italian way, but where he nonetheless belongs...
...Like Mr...
...Mostly we are treated to the interminable jockey-ings for position of his disciples, Adler and Jung and the rest, who are presented as sleazy backbiters...
...The confidant was flabbergasted...
...Hitler's ashes are strewn somewhere under the rubble of an eastern Berlin...
...Mussolini did not say much...
...The bodies of Benito Mussolini and Clara Petacci were brought to Milan where they were strung upside down on the girders of a filling station, jeered and spat upon by a crowd, some of whom may have cheered him but a few months before when he had addressed the people of Milan...
...So What are we waiting for...
...even though (or perhaps because...
...He is fecund and prolific (dear God, 15 he...
...In the end the Germans betrayed him: the SS general in command of Northern Italy made a pact with Allen Dulles, abandoning Mussolini to his fate...
...Burgess frustrates in the manner of Wyndham Lewis, whose craftsReid Buckley is a novelist...
...There seems to be almost nothing that he cannot say, and so say it that it sticks to the tastebuds deliriously long after...
...One comes to dread the resumptions of this narrative...
...Now Italy was divided in two, while the hot rake of war moved slowly-agonizingly slowly-up the peninsula of the boot...
...American secret agents are supposed to have taken half of his brain to Washington for "research...
...Can't you see it...
...With Nothing Like the Sun, his marvelous invention of a life of Will Shakespeare, he came close...
...after many years, he took up his pen on occasion, and wrote a few political articles which are still interesting to read...
...Despite lengthy (and repeated) interruptions by the other two narratives, Burgess builds tingling suspense, and two characters in this sequence, Courtland Willett, the out of work actor, and Val Brodie, a writer of science fictiqn, gain our affection...
...That Italy become an English colony, or a Soviet republic...
...But the Allies would have nothing to do with him-not even Churchill, who maintained a kind of respect for him until the end, and even beyond...
...We'll sell them the arms to do it...
...That side-the radical-was, as I wrote, but one side of his character...
...Dig that blockish grutnol, and who but Burgess (son of Joyce) would have thought of slabberdegul-lion as a modifier for druggel...
...He went nevertheless...
...His personae are often zany...
...they can be delightful...
...Like many prodigiously talented folk, he can be too clever by half...
...Sunday dawned on the empty streets of Rome...
...To both sides, impartial...
...During the last days of the war, walking in a garden, he turned to one of his confidants: "If you had a choice," he asked, "what would you prefer...
...We are soon asking the same question: what's it all for...
...When Willett is fired for his insults, he takes his Santa cap (he has been working as a storefront Saint Nicholas) and thrusts it onto the undermanager's head, "dousing him like a candle...
...On occasion his radical past would still govern his thoughts...
...he blamed that on the treachery of the King and the military politicians...
...We are given illustrations of the man's substantial ego...
...She told him not to-go to the King...
...but those that I've read of his dozen novels since continue to disappoint...
...There are some touching episodes with wife and daughter, but will you believe an Oedipal death involving his absurdly stereotyped (The) Jewish Mother...
...What he did not admit was that the war had been lost from the start...
...The Queen told the King that this was wrong...
...Six weeks later, when the Italians botched their attempt to shake loose of the Germans, Hitler sent a brigade of fierce paratroopers to descend on the mountain hotel where Mussolini was held captive...
...I," Mussolini said, "would prefer a Soviet republic...
...My introduction was The Wanting Seed...
...manship was also superior to his product...
...He was more than that...
...He would name a military government under Marshal Badoglio...
...It's What neutrality's for...
...Others in the cast are mini-series television, such as the neo-Nazi Bartlett who takes command of the escape spaceship project, and one, the President of the new meganation called The Commonwealth of the Democratic Americas, is little more than a snapshot that Burgess, in a bad fall from grace, uses to milk unearned tears out of the reader...
...Hubert Frame, her Man of Science father, is wooden, predictable, and entirely dialectical...
...Its whereabouts remain a mystery...
...The other was that of the Italian family man...
...The personae are all parodies, and there is no action on any plane, intellectual, emotional, or even physical...
...Though they are very different, Mr...
...The ho-ho-ho introduction, which is a take-off on an Edwardian adventure novel's conceit, is a bore...
...The publisher's puff, which he composes himself, and where he assures us of the seriousness of the novel, is both precious and sententious...
...yet, somehow, there's the wanting love that he dramatizes so eloquently in The Wanting Seed, one's emotions are rarely engaged, one is rarely brought to feel about the characters or truly care for them, so that their predicaments (and their lot) Scarcely ever entail more than our amused attention...
...He sent a priest to the Vatican to affirm that he was a believing Catholic, after all...
...He was truly an Italian, incarnating many, of the good and bad qualities of that intelligent and theatrical, humane and cynical race...
...There are some deadly lyrics: PACIFIST ORATOR: Keep out of it America...
...Burgess's wit is wicked, he is hilarious, and his characters, when he bothers, are observed, by which I mean that they are so incarnated by the imagination that he seems to be writing biography...
...With a handful of followers he began driving north, toward the Alpine frontier, when he was captured by Italian Communist partisans and murdered, together with his mistress, a day or so before his brutal friend Hitler shot himself to death in his bunker...
...other way out...
...he was so much more human than the other two, he was abandoned and reviled by his own people...
...Also, of course, a coward...
...Now the King was in the South, on the side of the Allies, having perpetrated what the remaining pro-Nazi Italians and Fascists called treachery, while Mussolini returned to his republican origins...
...Before his demise Italy had been a diarchy, a state with two heads: Mussolini and the King...
...Brodie's wife is the Blonde Intellectual Iceberg (that is, she freezes Brodie's libido...
...American journalists had invested him with the-epithet of a Sawdust Caesar...
...On occasion not so deliriously, as in "there was a rich scintillancy of maggots in the belly hole") The Rabelaisian Court-land Willett of the current opus pours scorn on the undermanager of a department store (who stood by while Willett was being attacked by street' hoodlums), calling him "a slab-berdegullion druggel [ooh!], a dod-dipol jolthead, a blockish grutnol, and a turdgut...
...Good lord...
...Willett is the Bohemian who Breaks Molds...
...But his "government," on Lake Garda, was not much more than a shadow, controlled by the Germans...
...LUKA£S (continued from page 17) told him not to go to that meeting...
...Excited, I went out and bought nine of his earlier novels, which I devoured, saying to myself: "One of these days he is going to produce...
...These long sections are excruciatingly dull, and we are driven to ask: is it the point that we (depressingly human) beings, even the geniuses amongst us, are mortals rife with petty little vanities...
...This is bad stuff, and bad writing, and it is the more inexcusable because it is served up by a pro whose craft never entirely deserts him...
...Of the three great dictators of his time Hitler was a cruel Austrian who wanted to be the greatest of Germans, Stalin an oriental Georgian who wanted to be the greatest of Russians: Mussolini was an Italian, as Italian as they come...
...Through clerical agents he tried to suggest to the Americans that he would make common cause with them against the danger of Communism...
...Where his own fate lay Mussolini did not know...
...Brodie is the Nice Guy, the Liberal Humanist, the Error-prone, Sinning, Everyman (but lovable...
...The King told him that he had to resign, because Italy had to get out of the war...
...There is no point to it...
...But there was no...
...He had been at the writer's trade a few years only, so there were but a thousand and sixty of his works to choose from...
...Trotsky's in New York, Stronger than a bull, Showing us a world Worth building...
...That's not News...
...Burgess's virtues hitting than his faults missing...
...The title is precious-a terrible pun...
...Burgess himself, the reader remains at a remove...
...On his way to his car he was asked to step into a military van: he was arrested...
...He knew that the war was lost...
...His demise was more shameful than Hitler's and Stalin's...
...For some time at least he was a great national leader, who then became an Italian Faust, someone who sold his soul to the devil...
...Freud's career, opens in Nazi Germany, backflashes to his early struggles, and ends with the cancer that destroys him...
...The effect is that of a bad college skit, in which the single joke is worked over and over...
...and a master of language...
...Burgess, one would swear, has it all...
...It's Europe's war...
...And then follows his three-ring circus, the yoking of unrelated stories in a single work of fiction: a futuristic thriller whose energumen is a rogue planet of terrific mass that grips the earth in its crushing embrace and finally pulverizes it (THE END...
...There are some dandy lyrics: Trotsky's in New York...
...Spilling out his wisdom like a cornucopia, Fiercer than a hurricane, Preaching an American-born Utopia...
...a heavily Freudianized life of the old gentleman himself that owes too much to Cuddihy's The Ordeal of Civility, and the libretto for an ersatz Broadway musical (it woulda bombed in New Haven) about Leon Trotsky during- his 1917 visit to New York...
...We begin to wonder: is Anthony Burgess's problem that he is a virtuoso of the writing craft who has nothing much of interest to say about either the human heart or the human condition...
...As we follow their debauches through the floods and earthquakes that attend the first swipe of the onrushing planet, we hope they survive, but like all the other characters in this miscegenated novel, each in his way, they are finally a stereotype...
...Not another brilliant novel, but a wholly satisfactory one...
...He is presented as a fanatically engrossed and abstracted prophet, which adds nothing either to the biog-raphies...
...Stalin was removed from the Lenin-Stalin mausoleum, his tomb is somewhere along the Kremlin wall, while his people are still restive and divided about his memory...
...PACIFIST: Keep out of it, keep out of it, Non-imperialist democratic America, And so forth...
...WARMONGERING ORATOR: The Huns are sinking our ships...
...Kaiser Wilhelm's Empire Flaps its wings like a vampire Ready to suck our blood...
...Let us leave them to it...
...Its whereabouts remain a mystery.h...
...Let his name be hurled Higher than the Wool-Worth Building...
...The Germans installed Mussolini in the north, he was now the head of neo-Fascist Italy, called the Italian Social Republic...
...He seldom appeared in splendiferous uniforms...
...The Trotsky sequences are tedious beyond belief, which is never once suspended...
...Let them batter themselves to bits...
...J. he End of the World News is a mish-mash with fewer of Mr...
...But there is a sense of justice in history, after all...
...If that's not an act of war, What is, I'd like to know...
...and Mussolini had long lost the appetite to rule...
...x he apocalyptic third storyline is fun...
Vol. 16 • August 1983 • No. 8
