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'A great genius may appear in almost any disguise; even in the disguise of a successful novelist'. Chesterton
Anthony Burgess, born John Anthony Burgess Wilson in 1917, grew up in Manchester to become the writer of more than 60 books. A driven man, obsessed with language, he produced at least two books a year at the height of his career, including novels and important critical works on James Joyce and D H Lawrence. Roger Lewis, whose earlier studies include Peter Sellers, has taken 20 years to produce a vast biography of Anthony Burgess, a man of many talents, who although best known as the author of A Clockwork Orange was also a composer, translator, academic and teacher during his long career. Despite his success, Burgess was haunted by the deaths of his mother and sister when he was less than two years old. This tragedy shaped his personality, of which 'anger and gloom were at the core', and followed him through his novels, two marriages and illness until his death from lung cancer in 1993. Ill-tempered and outspoken, he felt 'uneasy about being understood' and would bear long grudges against his critics. Roger Lewis expertly examines each chapter in Burgess's life in meticulous detail and juxtaposes his life story with Burgess's memoirs and analysis of his novels, concentrating on the parallel themes of love, sex, marriage, death and violence that ran between his writing and his life to give us an all-encompassing study of a troubled and colourful man. Lewis devotes too much space to his own experiences and complicated attitude to his subject, with immense digressions that sometimes stifle the man at the heart of the book and may prove unappealing to those not already familiar with Burgess. In spite of this, fans of Anthony Burgess and indeed Roger Lewis should not be disappointed with this meaty study of a literary heavyweight. (Kirkus UK)
Loquacious portraitist Lewis (The Real Life of Laurence Olivier, 1997, etc.) leaves no stone unturned in his obsessive and hardly sympathetic life of the tortured author of A Clockwork Orange. Born in 1917 to a working-class Catholic family in northeast Manchester, John Wilson (his name until his first novel, Time for a Tiger, was published in 1956) lost his sister and mother early to the flu epidemic and grew into an unfeeling, massively egotistical bookworm. His early years as an English teacher married to an unstoppable Welsh dipsomaniac ended with his transformation into Anthony Burgess, pompous polymath of mock scholarship. His thousand-word-a-day writing quota ensued from the famously inaccurate 1959 diagnosis of an inoperable brain tumor; he churned out four novels during the one year he thought he had left and was preoccupied thereafter with afflictions of the body. Later remarried to an Italian countess, Burgess composed more than 30 titles before his death in 1993, ranging from early "jungle novels" about his travels and on to potboilers and copious literary criticism (Joyce, Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, and Shakespeare), as well as Broadway adaptations, screenplays (Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth), and translations. His lurid study of mechanized violence didn't take off until Stanley Kubrick's chilling film version in 1971, and Lewis makes some mischievous revelations about A Clockwork Orange: Burgess lifted the idea from a French translation he had done years before, and the novel supposedly encrypts covert operations the author was allegedly engaged in with Her Majesty's Secret Service. Aiming to situate Burgess in the grand scheme of English-language literary history, Lewis does so magisterially, especially in the chatty, page-long footnotes comparing him to heavyweight contemporaries Graham Greene, Kingsley Amis, and Iris Murdoch, among others. Lewis can forgive his subject for preposterous subterfuges, but can't rid himself of "discomfiture" over Burgess's extreme writerly froideur. Trenchant and dogged, expunging the biographer of a 20-year anxiety of influence. (Kirkus Reviews)
Express, 30 November 2002
Lewis is an intellectual showman, a connoisseur of the arcane, a collector of titillating trivia.
See all Product Description
'A great genius may appear in almost any disguise; even in the disguise of a successful novelist'. Chesterton
Anthony Burgess, born John Anthony Burgess Wilson in 1917, grew up in Manchester to become the writer of more than 60 books. A driven man, obsessed with language, he produced at least two books a year at the height of his career, including novels and important critical works on James Joyce and D H Lawrence. Roger Lewis, whose earlier studies include Peter Sellers, has taken 20 years to produce a vast biography of Anthony Burgess, a man of many talents, who although best known as the author of A Clockwork Orange was also a composer, translator, academic and teacher during his long career. Despite his success, Burgess was haunted by the deaths of his mother and sister when he was less than two years old. This tragedy shaped his personality, of which 'anger and gloom were at the core', and followed him through his novels, two marriages and illness until his death from lung cancer in 1993. Ill-tempered and outspoken, he felt 'uneasy about being understood' and would bear long grudges against his critics. Roger Lewis expertly examines each chapter in Burgess's life in meticulous detail and juxtaposes his life story with Burgess's memoirs and analysis of his novels, concentrating on the parallel themes of love, sex, marriage, death and violence that ran between his writing and his life to give us an all-encompassing study of a troubled and colourful man. Lewis devotes too much space to his own experiences and complicated attitude to his subject, with immense digressions that sometimes stifle the man at the heart of the book and may prove unappealing to those not already familiar with Burgess. In spite of this, fans of Anthony Burgess and indeed Roger Lewis should not be disappointed with this meaty study of a literary heavyweight. (Kirkus UK)
Loquacious portraitist Lewis (The Real Life of Laurence Olivier, 1997, etc.) leaves no stone unturned in his obsessive and hardly sympathetic life of the tortured author of A Clockwork Orange. Born in 1917 to a working-class Catholic family in northeast Manchester, John Wilson (his name until his first novel, Time for a Tiger, was published in 1956) lost his sister and mother early to the flu epidemic and grew into an unfeeling, massively egotistical bookworm. His early years as an English teacher married to an unstoppable Welsh dipsomaniac ended with his transformation into Anthony Burgess, pompous polymath of mock scholarship. His thousand-word-a-day writing quota ensued from the famously inaccurate 1959 diagnosis of an inoperable brain tumor; he churned out four novels during the one year he thought he had left and was preoccupied thereafter with afflictions of the body. Later remarried to an Italian countess, Burgess composed more than 30 titles before his death in 1993, ranging from early "jungle novels" about his travels and on to potboilers and copious literary criticism (Joyce, Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, and Shakespeare), as well as Broadway adaptations, screenplays (Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth), and translations. His lurid study of mechanized violence didn't take off until Stanley Kubrick's chilling film version in 1971, and Lewis makes some mischievous revelations about A Clockwork Orange: Burgess lifted the idea from a French translation he had done years before, and the novel supposedly encrypts covert operations the author was allegedly engaged in with Her Majesty's Secret Service. Aiming to situate Burgess in the grand scheme of English-language literary history, Lewis does so magisterially, especially in the chatty, page-long footnotes comparing him to heavyweight contemporaries Graham Greene, Kingsley Amis, and Iris Murdoch, among others. Lewis can forgive his subject for preposterous subterfuges, but can't rid himself of "discomfiture" over Burgess's extreme writerly froideur. Trenchant and dogged, expunging the biographer of a 20-year anxiety of influence. (Kirkus Reviews)
Express, 30 November 2002
Lewis is an intellectual showman, a connoisseur of the arcane, a collector of titillating trivia.
See all Product Description
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