Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a Real pleasure, 26 Nov 2005
For longtime admirers of Anthony Burgess, as well as for members of his growing posthumous readership (like me), this book is an event. A dozen years since the death of one of the dozen best British novelists of the last half-century, Anthony Burgess finally has the biography he deserves. As scrupulous and as scholarly as the pseudo-biography of Roger Lewis of 2002 was distinctly un-so, this book captures all the personal and professional contrasts and contradictions of a mercurial, myriad-minded novelist-composer-poet-critic-playwright-translator whose lapsed Catholicism and lust for language were the twin goads that drove a stunning prolificness. For me his great verbal fluency—in books like the epic Earthly Powers and the picaresque verse-novel Byrne—match anything done since by Martin Amis, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, and all the other prizewinning wunderkinds and polymaths of the present day. An unworthy critical reaction to Burgess’s unapologetic creative overplus seems to own the review pages in the UK right now, but Burgess is bigger than the land of his birth, and an embarrassing about-face may shortly follow, once the English rediscover what Burgess’s international readers already recognize—a comprehensive, insightful literary intelligence that any nation would be proud to lay claim to. From the rough streets of Manchester to the rowdiness of the Far East to the drunken roustabout of Burgess’s first marriage to the stylistic refinements of his best work, Andrew Biswell paints a careful, colourful portrait of a formidable artist and a fallible man. A Real pleasure, not to be missed.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The real Real Life, 13 Sep 2006
In seeking to encompass Anthony Burgess's life in 400 pages, Andrew Biswell has taken on quite a task. Not only did Burgess produce poetry, biography, autobiography, works on music and linguistics, screenplays, children's books, mountains of journalism and over thirty novels, but almost every claim he made about his life seems to have been disputed at one time or another. Biswell, though, proves to be more than up to it. He manages to resolve the various controversies with something that looks like finality. Did Burgess's father really come in one evening to find his wife and daughter dead of Spanish flu and the infant Burgess still alive next to them? The answer is yes; but Biswell re-dates the episode by reference to the death certificates, and points to inconsistencies in Burgess's subsequent re-tellings of the story. What of his claims to have been trepanned by Sir Roger Bannister and given a year to live, leading him to bang out five novels in twelve months? This has been believed widely, but it turns out not to be true. Biswell shows as much by digging out Sir Roger and asking him. The neurologist (and, of course, athlete) explains he never performed a trepanning because he was never a surgeon. Burgess's legendary prolificness must have had its roots elsewhere. In these cases and others, Biswell does not allow his evident affection for Burgess stop him puncturing his claims. Of course, the biography has its faults as well. It says nothing about the supposed rape of Burgess's wife by GIs, an event said to have inspired a passage in A Clockwork Orange but which subsequently has been called into doubt. Also there are moments where one suspects that, having done his research, Biswell is reluctant not to display the results - so we get to hear an account of English defamation law (Burgess didn't grasp it) and the ins and outs of a portal haemorrhage (Burgess's wife died of one). Still, this is at least educational, and throughout the book Biswell is forensic, thought-provoking and even-handed. This really is the real life.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Rising from the floor of a Brunei classroom, 20 Aug 2006
Both scholarly and rollicking, Biswell's biog fizzes from start to finish. His account of the real life of Anthony Burgess is as wide ranging as the great man's vocabulary, and reveals a noisy, rambunctious life filled with quiet heroism. In a world of disposable celebrity, the Real Life of Anthony Burgess gives an insight into the mind of a man of immense depth, personality and wisdom, so read it, and raise a glass to Anthony Burgess.
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