A Cycle of Cathay

...He is somewhat more successful with women than many of his fictional fellows...

...To this line, Anthony Burgess has added the hero of his trilogy The Long Day Wanes...

...One of Burgess' subsequent novels, A Clockwork Orange, has a glossary of a coined future language, founded on Russian...

...An alcoholic English policeman, who speaks vulgarly the language he learned in the cradle, prefers to converse in Urdu with an Indian because he learned that language well, and the good use of it inflates him...

...This trilogy, extraordinarily rewarding though most of it is, is inferior to his later work, but this, of course, is a happy fact...

...He is out to dramatize the complexity, almost ridiculously complex, of populations and problems in Malaya, and the series of shifting viewpoints help his Malayans, Tamils, Chinese, Sikhs, Eurasians, variegated Britons (even a belated American) to create crazy heart-aching contradictions...

...In The Right To An Answer he rings the nice reversal of bringing an Asian to England, as Newby brought back an Egyptian in A Guest and His Going...

...but this is not to say that Burgess is donnish...

...His later novel Devil of a State is set in a hypothetical East African country that (as Stanley Edgar Hyman has noted) is obviously based on Brunei, where he also taught...

...Here and in other books, Burgess' master in style and in quality of artistic appetite seems to be Waugh...

...Since he wrote this trilogy, which moves in the directions mentioned in the first sentence of the above quotation, Burgess has opted for the directions in the last sentence...

...And, as Burgess, he has published eleven novels since 1956, one of which (Nothing Like the Sun) has the odd but valid distinction of being the best fiction ever written about the man Shakespeare...

...Thus Burgess and the Empire...

...There is a short glossary in the trilogy, of words in four or five languages—not essential but interesting...

...Though these first novels are not at the Waugh level in either regard, Burgess is a quick disciple...

...He has become a much more refined artist, seeking truth not only in perceptions of truth but through the most rigorous, distilled means of stating it...

...Those who know Burgess will not be surprised that, even in this first work, language as such fascinates him...

...The familiars of Burgess will also be interested in this trilogy as the first of the East-West confrontations in his fiction...

...Examples of the former are Waugh's Decline and Fall, Amis' Lucky Jim, Bradbury's Eating People Is Wrong...

...To quote a sentence like "Vorpal had the trick of adding a Malay enclitic to his utterances" is in fact fair sampling of this aspect...

...There can be few writers alive who would not like to murder him...

...Burgess has been a teacher in Malaya...

...The ways that men speak, the mutations within a language, are to Burgess paths of light through the tangles of human behavior, which is his primary interest...

...His trilogy is about a teacher in Malaya...

...His characters, hot in their differences with each other and within themselves, are seen in a view that combines compassion with comedy...

...Reviewed by STANLEY KAUFFMANN Contributing Editor, "New Republic" There have been two especially productive veins in modern British fiction: the novel of the teacher-hero and the novel of the Englishman in the colonies or "backward" countries who serves as commentator on change and catalyst...

...There are many references to phonetics, peculiarities of word and phrase, variations in the different tongues that are encountered...

...For Burgess and the novel, we may look to a passage from a recent review he wrote in Encounter magazine, on the significance of C. P. Snow and Angus Wilson: "I think both are prized, and will continue to be prized, for the skill and integrity with which they have illuminated contemporary society and uncovered some of the forces which drive it...

...Whether this is the true function of the novel is a matter for debate...

...The sun is doubtlessly setting on the British Empire, but the sunset will glow for some time yet in British literature...

...He regularly writes criticism of fiction in English journals...

...The three component novels, which were published in England in 1956, 1958, 1959, are presumably his first serious fiction, yet he plunged right into difficult territory, risky in technique and subject...

...This provides opportunities for him to quote their (his) verse, sufficient for him to disport himself although not enough to incur much poetic responsibility...

...but, like most of them, he is in the whole of his life crucified on a cross of good intention and frustrated act, thus a protagonist who can bring us double comforts...

...the latter-day, baggy-pants sahib cannot help being amused at the same time that he knows he has no moral or historical right to be amused...

...He also gives two of his characters the gift of writing poetry...

...He is a composer who has had a symphony performed...

...Those who are following this astonishing man's career must be grateful to his publishers for filling in some of his past and, despite the earlier work's flaws, heightening the astonishment...

...Burgess is a current example of a phenomenon that is relatively constant in British culture: the polymath and versatile creator...

...His introduction to philology, Language Made Plain, recently appeared here...

...Victor Crabbe, the teacher, is tinged not only with the unavoidable sadness of nostalgia but with some sadness for what he sees ahead in liberation...

...The author who adopts it has, in effect, to convince the reader quickly that he has chosen it purposefully out of a range of methods, not out of restriction or antiquarianism...

...Some of us may prefer to see the advance of the art of fiction in other, less publicised, corners, where what endures in man is more important than what changes in society, and the wrestling with new techniques means nothing more than an attempt to probe deeper into the essence of human personality...

...The ill wind of imperialism has blown a deal of wry, humane good through some contemporary British novelists—especially comic ones...

...Burgess' primary purpose is not to provide background reading for news stories, it is to delineate contrasting characters in all their pathetic cussedness...

...The latter are even more numerous...

...Burgess succeeds swiftly...

...The interplay of these ego-centrisms around Crabbe—a somewhat shabby, fornicating, quasi-saintly failure who wants remarkably little besides to serve and to live quietly—epitomizes the decline of the West in the East without prophesying rosily about the rise of the East...

...Fielding in A Passage to India, one of whose notable descendants is the hero of P. H. Newby's Egyptian novel, The Picnic at Sakkara...

...He has published two novels under the pen name Joseph Kell...

...Though the source of the title is not given, I assume it is from Tennyson's Ulysses, a poem that tells of old voyagers and heroes who strove with gods and hope to find something worthy of their great past in their slender future...

...The risk in method was in the use of multiple viewpoints, a number of characters seen from within through interweaving plot motions —a dangerous method these days because it is old-fashioned in an era of intense central subjectivity in fiction...

...He has published two books of literary criticism and history...

...Sometimes the two veins are united to give us the teacher in an exotic setting: the daddy of this breed is Mr...

...His second risk was in the familiarity of his theme—imperial transition—and of his teacher-protagonist...

...It is simply one more facet of his ability to play in language like a porpoise in the sea...

...he is (as in Honey for the Bears) composing more stringently, with much greater control and more evocative ellipsis: without the streaks of confusion and contrivance that mar the last novel of this trilogy and with nothing like its overt bids for sympathy...

...His enormously varied, enormous cast—few of whom are in all three books— could not otherwise be individualized so memorably...

...But his observations are so taking and pungent, his colors of place, politics, person so clear, that this familiarity breeds only respect— even if we do see this trilogy (speaking broadly) as a further chapter in a large national work...

...but he is so keen a viewer, so thoroughly, almost masochistically moved by the teeming paradoxes of the land, that we cannot leave his trilogy without better knowledge of Malayan life at ground level...

...once we move into his rhythm (after the first 10 or 15 pages), we cannot conceive that any other method could have been used...

...As is usual with these modern teacher-heroes, Crabbe is a bit of a bungler, a liberal libertarian not always able to cope with the practical...

...some ready examples are Waugh again with Black Mischief and Scoop, Orwell's Burmese Days, Reynolds' A Woman of Bangkok...