The Novel as Television

...The Novel as Television The End of the World News: An Entertainment By Anthony Burgess McGraw-Hill 389 pp $15 95 Reviewed by Michael Dirda Here is a novel with something for everyone—at least for everyone who watches television several hours a night Anthony Burgess has subtitled it An Entertainment, presumably meaning it is to be judged as a light jeu d'esprit rather than an ambitious inquiry into the human soul, or society, or whatever else novels are supposed to be Actually, like his earlier Napoleon Symphony, it is an instance of the author s obsession with musical form adapted to words that sort of manages to be both musical and televisual And ultimately meretricious In a tired Nabokovian homage, The End of the World News opens with a Preface by John B Wilson, BA—apparently the author's literary executor—who describes in a suitable fustian the origin of the manuscript (Readers who recollect that Burgess was christened John Anthony Burgess Wilson are supposed to chuckle ) Wilson reveals that the inspiration for this work derived from a Life magazine photograph of President Carter and family avidly watching three televisions at once Burgess, ever on the lookout for a new structure to exploit, must have exclaimed That's it—a television-novel1 I'll have three stories broken into short segments, intermixed and mingled, and thus achieve the effect of viewers switching the channels back and forth This will also suggest analogies to a fugue as the tales repeat, invert or otherwise make variations on themes, images and ideas The techniques, of course, can be traced to any number of progenitors Michel Butor composed Niagara, which he called a "stereophonic" novel, by presenting some half-dozen simultaneous story lines about visitors to Niagara Falls In Ulysses Joyce broke up perspective as he shifted viewpoint among various characters, building internal echoes and counterpoints Then there is the hoary dramatic device of plot / counterplot / subplot, where sets of characters progress more or less antiphonally—think of the way A Midsummer Night's Dream rings changes on the course of true love If the method is not all that original, what about the stories themselves'' Burgess chooses as his subjects what he considers the most earth-shaking (or world-ending) movements of the past 100 years Freud's discoveries in psychology, the socialist dream of a classless society and man's exploration of space A reasonable trio, each with its own glamour To embody these pioneering ventures, Burgess juxtaposes differing forms of narration A life of Freud, recounted mainly in dialogue—as though it were a script for Masterpiece Theater, a Brecht / Weill-like opera libretto based on Trotsky's visit to New York in 1917—intended, no doubt, for Great Performances, and a science-fiction disaster tale about the collision of earth with another planet—certainly a potential low budget made-for-TV movie Once Burgess has all his ducks in a row, he pushes them along steadily, taking care that the stones provide plenty of parallels for the attentive reader The life of Freud focuses on the standard highlights (and hijinks) of the career—cocaine, the interpretation of dreams, the "talking cure," the gathering of disciples and their disaffection, cancer, Nazism Yet here Burgess does convey a genuine intellectual excitement Freud's history is rendered primarily as that of the indomitable father of the psychiatric movement betrayed, rightly or wrongly, by his sons—Alfred Adler, Otto Rank, Carl Jung No such admiration is shown for the advocate of permanent revolution The section that might be called "Trotsky in New York" suggests commediadell'arte at least as much as opera seria Trotsky appears at first as a sexist philistine and bullying fanatic who, in falling in love with a gentle Socialist named Olga, for a while learns to temper his revolutionary zeal with humane feeling He becomes a male Ninotchka, charmed by Olga, New York and the American way of life Even when revolution finally occurs back home in Russia, Trotsky finds that his desperate love for his son, who appears to have been kidnapped, far outweighs any political convictions or Party ambitions In the science-fiction narrative—the main one—still more father-son relationships pop up, the most prominent being the tender, affectionate camaraderie between the hero and Courtland Willett, a kind of Falstaffian-Dylan Thomasy actor (He once appeared, we learn, in a musical about Trotsky and a play about Freud) So we have three images of dad dictatorial father, loving papa and fantasy big brother This is the kind of thing Burgess can do extremely well Although the device can feel a bit clanky and stagey at times, it might have redeemed The End of the World News if the science fiction story were not so trite Scientists discover that a rogue planet will sweep across the earth's gravitational field, causing violent tremors, flooding and other natural disasters This planet, called Lynx, will then swing round the sun, and on a second pass, collide with earth Mankind will perish, leaving not a wrack behind—unless a ship can be constructed to travel to far galaxies bearing a select number of men and women to preserve the race (Observe yet another triplet, that of the high priests and the herd the Freudian inner circle, the revolutionary advance guard, the scientific elite ) The bulk of the story then concerns itself with the intersecting destinies of various characters the brilliant, dying scientific genius, his icily beautiful genius daughter (a castrating Dale Arden), Mr Fascist Perfect Specimen who heads the space project, a weak, wan science-fiction writer standing in as human imperfection, the Rabelaisian life force, Courtland Willett, and so on The suspense mounts, at least in theory, as everyone converges on the launch site and the big question becomes Who will be on board starship "America" when she finally blasts off At the conclusion of the first segment of "Freud" that begins the book, daughter Anna is just about to open "a cheap sensational novel Cut to the start of the above global disaster story Clever9 Maybe But Burgess seems to have fallen into the fallacy of imitative form He treats a commonplace subject in a commonplace way Nothing is transmuted, the dross stays dross Perhaps Burgess has simply wasted too much time on TV and the movies, tor he presents the most simplistic, archaic form of science fiction Take memories of When Worlds Collide, the flood sequences from John Wyndham's Out of the Depths, a dash of Walter M Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, some of the author's own A Clockwork Orange, and a healthy shaking of early Robert Heinlein Et voila' Burgess even borrows his wowie-zowie ending-with life continuing on a multi generation starship—from the premise of Heinlein's first-rate novella, "Universe" Plotting, though, has never been Burgess' strong suit He possesses two extraordinary gifts He has read almost everything and he can make words dance to any tune he plays The first quality makes for an excellent essayist and entertaining reviewer—and that Burgess is, as anyone can testify who has picked up his Urgent Copy, Shakespeare or The Novel Now He can discourse with authority, if only brief authority, about anything and the result will be informative and generally delightful as well His second talent shines forth in his best novels Nothing Like the Sun, A Clockwork Orange and Enderby When he creates a beefy rich idiom—Elizabethan English, a late 20th-century futurespeak, the savory Bloomian texture of Enderby's life-his prose becomes so mouth-watering you want to eat it In many of his books, Burgess has adopted plots, characters, techniques, styles from his wide reading a medieval legend for The Eve of Saint Venus, history for Napoleon Symphony, the Gospels for Man of Nazareth, Orwell's work for 1985 There is nothing wrong with this, provided the material is really digested and not simply disgorged Unfortunately, Burgess' recent novels too often resemble facile elaborations on someone else's designs Lately, in fact, he is always imitating, parodying His last big book, Earthly Powers, uncannily captured the easy, urbane style of Somerset Maugham—a task that hardly seemed worth the effort In The End of the World News everything is obvious, blatant, without enough of the bawdy gusto and dazzling filigree we go to Burgess tor Nevertheless, sporadic linguistic energy —in Willett's Rabelaisian monologues, the clinical gravity of Freud's speech, the ingenious songs in "Trotsky"—does grant this new book enough momentum to keep one reading There should be more I wish Burgess would go back to emphasizing his Joyce-Hopkins-Shakespeare side, and downplay his attempts to be the complete man of letters, part Samuel Johnson, part Hugh Walpole But I fear it may be too late The dust jacket of The End of the World News shows Anthony Burgess leaning forward in a chair, cigar in hand, ascot tied around his neck, hair combed in a gentle wave, lips slightly pursed Looking at his picture brings to mind those horror stories by Edgar Allan Poe or H P Lovecraft in which a man or woman is gradually taken over by some undead spirit Once I hoped that Burgess might become a more prolific and popular Joyce In this photograph, alas, I can only make out the unmistakable features and disdainful air of W Somerset Maugham...