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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
'When a biographer hates his subject can he be trusted?'', 25 Oct 2003
John Wilson, aka Anthony Burgess, died in November 1993 the author of 32 novels, various televison/film scripts, translations from various languages of plays, opera libretti, etc, a composer in his own right, a televison personality, teacher, member of the royal society of literature, etc etc. Here we have a biography that has taken, or so it's claimed, twenty years to write. And yet it makes no use of the major sources? Often quotes coversations from the past - from memory? - without sourcing the information. It is obviously a resentful book, but worse is basically flawed, especially with regard to the facts of Burgess / Wilson's life. Further it ends in 1968? Thus twenty-five years of very (most?)productive life is ignored - who knows why? - and that part of Burgess' life that it does cover, consist of a number of wild and unsubstantiated assertions - which factually are wrong, and in some instances border on total absurdity. Burgess doesn't deserve such shallow treatment. He was a great writer, a modern, who eperimented with form and style, and who enlarged the possibilites of the English novel for his contempories and those who follow after him. A great disapointment as a true depiction of Burgess, but a good example of biography as fiction - very unconvincing fiction, to be sure. We must all await a rational, well researched and calm biography of someone who was after all said and done a remarkable personality.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Stars and Daggers, 24 Jun 2005
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.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
an egotistical travesty, 23 Feb 2007
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, writerly envy. 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). Although he rests rather awkwardly in the neatly tended garden of post-war British novelists, it is precisely his European sensibility, its breadth and ambition, which makes him so fascinating a literary outsider. And his wearing of masks, both literary and personal, is all part of the creative fun to be celebrated. Tellingly, many of the minor writers who Lewis cites in support of his critical attacks (John Wain, John Baily etc)are products of the narrow Oxbridge academic world Burgess disdained. And this biographer seems ever anxious to position himself alongside Burgess and Richard Ellmann, exceptional men both. 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 as a journalistic book reviewer and as a teacher. I would warmly recommend Andrew Biswell's biography as the first serious and scholarly account of Burgess.
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