The End of the World News:
Cook, Bruce
Emptying the desk drawers THE END OF THE WORLD NEWS Anthony Burgess McGraw-Hill, $15.95, 389 pp. Bruce Cook ANTHONY BURGESS, who once wrote a flattering review of a novel he had published under a...
...It is unimaginably silly to find Trotsky bursting into song about the revolution at one minute, and then serenading his New York love, Olga, in the next...
...The probe will send the best and the brightest out into the universe to search for a new home, a new earth to colonize - and if not them, then their children, or their children's children...
...It will come, according to Burgess's fiction, not from nuclear destruction, but rather through the agency of a huge asteroid, dubbed Lynx, which is approaching the earth in a path close enough to turn the moon out of orbit and throw it against the earth, crushing much of it, destroying the rest with earthquakes and tidal floods...
...Jimmy Carter sitting and watching not one but three television sets at once: "The author's comment on this procedure and its possible application to the craft of the novel provides an evident clue as to his intention in the work you have before you...
...Television and the commercial theater are just two of the places in which Burgess has dithered lately...
...The end of the world...
...Yet the way of escape had been pointed out years before by Valentine Brodie, a science fiction writer and the husband of Vanessa Frame, who with her father initiated the project...
...Look for it in the year 2000...
...This is a fair description of The End of the World News, right down to the aside that the Freud section seems to have been written with television in mind...
...I fear that as good and entertaining a writer as he is, Anthony Burgess wishes to be thought a major writer, one who is willing to produce thick books with fancy structural theories hatched up after the fact a la Lawrence Durrell...
...Because of this, and out of deference to Vanessa, Brodie is included on the passenger list as the only non-scientist on the planned flight...
...Most of the novel - and this science fiction tale is the only one of the book's three fictional components that can truly be called a novel - has to do with Brodie's picaresque journey across an America rent by cataclysm in the company of a Falstaffian actor named Wil-lett...
...I'll bet not), and then he describes the manuscript of the book at hand in these terms: "There appeared to be here arbitrarily assembled a fantastic tale of the end of the world, a brief biography of Sigmund Freud clearly intended, on the evidence of a preponderance of simple dialogue and a minimum of recit, as the raw material of a television series, and the libretto of a musical play on the theme of the visit of Leon Trotsky to the city of New York in 1917...
...The characters - Freud himself, Jung, Otto Rank, and others - are very well drawn, and the conflicts between them are made quite real...
...Just at the last moment, however, Val is separated from Vanessa and her father as they are departing for the launchsite in Kansas...
...A bit of the true Burgess of old...
...Freud...
...He could have rescued this material by turning it into a full novel...
...There is a bit of rigamarole about Wilson being Burgess's literary executor (does this mean his subsequent works will appear under the Wilson name...
...Bruce Cook ANTHONY BURGESS, who once wrote a flattering review of a novel he had published under a different name and then got fired for it, would surely have had a field day with this one, his latest...
...On the other hand, The End of the World News may simply have provided a good opportunity for him to empty his desk drawers of spare man-scripts...
...The thing is simply not worthy of inclusion here, not worthy of publication at all...
...And if he is accepted as a major writer, not just his manuscripts but even his laundry lists will be of interest to the scholarly worms that feed upon his corpus...
...What Burgess has given us is good but rather thin and unfinished, very much indeed like a treatment for a television "docu-drama," which may certainly have been the way it started out...
...And in a sense, he has written his own review of the book right there in a foreword to which he has signed his own, real name, John Wilson...
...It is a bit muddled, with the involvement of a Billy Graham-like evangelist and a couple of gangsters and all, but when the narrative of the trip is not actually horrifying (blood sacrifices, cannibalistic orgies, etc...
...Quite a different matter...
...As for the rest of the book, well, I found myself reading very quickly through Trotsky-in-New York to get on to Val Brodie's tale...
...He suggests in the foreword that television-viewing provides a kind of loose framework for the work as a whole and presents as a paradigm a photograph of then-President and Mrs...
...Not only is it the longest of the three, taking up just under half the book's pages, but it is also a slice of Burgess at his best, recalling his work of the early sixties, specifically his "Catholic" science fiction piece, The Wanting Seed...
...it is really extraordinarily funny...
...For that matter, I also wonder why he felt obliged to pad out the science fiction tale with two such pieces as Trotsky and Freud, one feebly insubstantial and the other unfinished...
...Well, if the Carters - or anyone else - were watching The End of the World News simultaneously on their three sets, then I can guarantee you that it wouldn't be long before their attention would be riveted upon the one in which Burgess's "fantastic tale of the end of the world" was unreeling...
...This end has been foreseen by a group of scientists who, with the support of the federal government, are preparing for departure by spaceship...
...I wonder why he didn't...
Vol. 110 • September 1983 • No. 16
