Anthony Burgess [Hardcover]

Roger Lewis's mean-spirited and astonishingly egotistical biography is a travesty. It largely refuses to acknowledge Anthony Burgess's protean talent and wide-ranging artistic achievements. Lewis attempts to nail Burgess as an artistic charlatan masquerading as a great writer, and in the process reveals rather too much about his own personal prejudices and, one strongly suspects on the evidence here, writerly envy. It is, indeed, a somewhat dispiriting experience to read a book written with such admirable stylistic fluency and skill, that is at the same time so lacking in charm and objective generosity towards its subject.

Even the most partisan admirers of Burgess would, I'm sure, recognise the problematic nature of describing his legacy (see, for example, Lorna Sage's excellent obituary piece in her volume of selected journalism, Good As Her Word). Although he rests rather awkwardly in the neatly tended garden of post-war British novelists, it is precisely Burgess's European sensibility, his cross-cultural breadth and linguistic ambition, which makes him so fascinating a literary outsider. And his wearing of masks, both literary and personal, is all part of the creative inventiveness to be celebrated.

Tellingly, several of the relatively minor writers who Lewis cites in support of his critical-personal attacks (John Wain, John Bayley etc) are themselves products of the narrow Oxbridge academic world that Burgess disdained. And this biographer seems ever anxious to position himself socially alongside Burgess and his admired friend, Richard Ellmann, exceptional men both. One of the numerous subtle manifestations of this authorial status anxiety is the full page prominence afforded in the book to a photograph of a Telex message from Burgess to Lewis, confirming a theatre rendevous in Oxford. In this one telling image, Lewis, seemingly unable to decentre himself from his own work, manages both to namedrop his enviable sounding address, and to signal that a world famous author is contacting him to socialise. Meanwhile, the level of personal abuse aimed at Burgess just seems nasty and irrelevant to the story. As I reread Lewis's book, I was reminded of the compelling anecdotal evidence of Burgess's outstanding generosity and kindness as a journalistic book reviewer and as a teacher. I would recommend Andrew Biswell's biography as a serious and more scholarly alternative account of Burgess.

This book, which I found entertaining, is not meant to be a balanced appraisal of Anthony Burgess. It is instead deliberately egotistical, vindictive, overwritten, pompous, lacking warmth and strewn with arcane pointless footnotes. I think Lewis fibs quite a lot.

I think the author's intention was to create a portrait of Burgess that echoed Burgess's character as he understood it. I can understand why some fans of Burgess do not like this approach, and would suggest that this book be read in conjunction with a more conventional biography. Thats's what I'm going to do anyway!

I think it obviously Lewis has tremendous respect for Burgess's productivity, his technical brilliance and his knowledge, but feels that something - the something that true genius has - was missing, and Lewis shows how this happened. The Burgess he presents is sad, lonely and disconnected from the world. Burgess used his talent to distance himnself from the world and not to engage with it. That's the impression I got anyway. I also felt that Lewis despite the style felt immensely sorry for Burgess, but rather that write something that was anaemic and conventional, discharged both barrels, this in order to get something about Burgess in the world that would be noticed. I think in some apparently perverse way it's a tribute to the man.

The book will enable me to get more out of rereading Clockwork Orange, A Dead Man in Deptford , Abba Abba......

It is difficult to be enthusiastic about a book full of so much negativity, and footnotes.

Not only are we given relentless detail about what a dreadful man Burgess was, his manifold hang-ups, and personal obnoxiousness, but this biography's author also seems determined to vent his spleen in the reader's general direction.

In what is pretty dense prose in places, the colossal amount of footnotes does nothing to help the reader make sense of the chronology of Burgess' life.

What does emerge is the portrait of a complex human being, which is tantalisingly interesting, but with such sniping from the author at his subject, instead of insight, it seems hardly worth the bother of getting to the end.