Unearthly powers

Andrew Biswell's biography of A Clockwork Orange author Anthony Burgess succeeds in rescuing this eccentric character's reputation from literary oblivion. By Edward O'Hare

The real life of Anthony Burgess. By Andrew Biswell. Picador, 2006. €30

Fending off hoodlums in Manhattan with a sword-stick, defending the sanctity of art before an unruly mob at the Cannes film festival, plotting a film about Napoleon, Anthony Burgess lived a life more exciting than most fiction. Most famous for his work, A Clockwork Orange, which was later made into the controversial film by Stanley Kubrick, Burgess was far more than just the creator of a one-off cult hit.

Over the course of his forty-year literary career he penned over thirty novels, several novellas, along with screenplays and television scripts. He was a master critic who wrote studies of Joyce, Lawrence, Shakespeare and Orwell, thousands of book reviews and other journalism. Burgess was also a classical composer who had several of his symphonies performed and even turned Joyce's Ulysses into a musical for RTÉ.

Finding the source of this manic activity within Burgess' personality is the quest that Andrew Biswell chronicles in this, his first book. Biswell has a difficult task as Burgess constantly misrepresented the facts of his own life. Poor reviews were always part of some vast conspiracy to destroy him and fleeting encounters with other writers became monumental intellectual duels.

Biswell's take on Burgess is of a man who always believed he was playing a game with the world. Just as Joyce made words mean whatever he wanted them to, Burgess used his position as a novelist to interchange fantasy and reality. He contrived much of the farce and chaos of his life in order to appear as a romantic artist. All this was really just innocent fun for an intelligent man with a fine sense of the ludicrous.

However, Burgess played this game so well that his real identity is now indistinguishable from his legend. Biswell manages to nail down many of these Burgess personas, but the overall effect is that he is lost in a hall of mirrors, each one containing a different Burgess image. He does not attempt any amateur psychology. The facts are sensational enough, and point the way to the waywardness of Burgess' later behaviour. Born John Wilson in Manchester in 1917, his music-hall singer mother and sister succumbed to the Spanish Flu epidemic when he was an infant. His father perished a decade later leaving Burgess a virtual orphan.

Burgess worked hard at school and acquired a passion for literature and music. Life dealt him a terrible hand and he bravely chose to see it as an opportunity to totally reinvent himself. He became a schoolteacher in Wales and met Lynne Jones who became his first wife. World War Two saw him posted to Gibraltar where he did little apart from develop his lifelong hatred for authority figures and his ability to drink. During this time Lynne was attacked by deserting GIs, an incident from which she never recovered.

On his return Burgess signed up for the Colonial Service and worked in Malaysia and later Brunei. Disaster had not finished with him yet. In 1959 he was invalided out of Brunei with a suspected brain tumour. Believing that he had only a year to live he threw himself into fiction, producing five novels whose royalties his wife was to live on. However, it was Burgess who lived on to carve out a reputation as one of the most versatile and inventive writers of his generation.

Lynne died from alcoholism in 1969 and Burgess remarried to an Italian countess and adopted the son whom he had unknowingly fathered during an affair with her several years before. With his career taking flight Burgess did his last vanishing act, leaving Britain for good in 1970. At this point Biswell's biography really gathers pace. He brilliantly tracks Burgess to each of the tax-havens where he set up home, including Malta, Rome, Monaco and Switzerland.

Biswell's explanation of Burgess' success is simple. He believed in value for money and wrote novels that combined scholarship, energy and humour. Certainly many sank without a trace but some, A Clockwork Orange, Abba Abba his novella about Keats, the surreal black comedy MF, and the magnificent, Booker-nominated, satirical epic Earthly Powers, endure as a testament to his creative genius.

Besides his fiction, Burgess contributed to every major English-speaking publication and once said that he refused no reasonable offer of work and very few unreasonable ones. With his ham actor's voice, curious haircut and penchant for fine cigars he was the archetypal polymath. Biswell clearly treasures some of the more absurd episodes of his later life, such as writing the script for Jesus of Nazareth while hurtling around winding mountain roads in a winnebago and strapping wads of cash to his legs to avoid paying tax when crossing borders.

Regardless of his occasional lapses into hack work, Burgess was a self-made man who enjoyed his success and the role it allowed him to play in life. He seized opportunities for new experiences, such as teaching Shakespeare to underprivileged teenagers from Harlem in the mid-1970s. Overall Biswell has done a fine job of bringing the reputation of this eccentric character, who died in 1993, back from literary oblivion and assessing it with the respect and affection it deserves.