Burgess was famed most for the grotesquely surreal A ClockworkOrange. Skeptic, scholar, linguist and composer, he wrote in thesame thoughtful, difficult, erudite, semiotically experimentaltradition of James Joyce, his hero.
No, Burgess has never been easy, although, unlike (say) ThomasPynchon, he is not at all impenetrable. Yes, Burgess loved toscatter polyglot obscurities like potholes throughout his more than50 novels and dozens of nonfiction works. Yet there always has beenan infectious joy to his romps in the meadows of language. He couldleap gaily from Welsh to French to Malay to Yiddish in one breath,and, if he cared to, he could transfix the reader upon an openingsentence: "I was in bed with my catamite," began one novel, "when theArchbishop came to call."There always has been something mesmerizing about Burgess'swork, even when one can't quite understand it all, and that is whyhis posthumous Byrne is such a pleasure.Its plot is simple. Michael Byrne, an Irishman born around1900, is an artist, composer and world-class letch who fathersbastards hither and yon through the tumultuous first decades of the20th century, fetching up in prewar Nazi Germany. There he producesscandalously erotic paintings and jackboot librettoes while sharing amistress with Josef Goebbels, finding "light relief" in "beer,schnapps, the joy of being drunk and Aryan,/though Hitler was ateetotalitarian."Afterwards Byrne disappears into Africa, and almost half acentury later three of "the fruits of his insemination" are summonedto London to hear the old man's will. They are Tim, a burnt-outpriest; his twin brother Tom, a professor suffering from cancer; andtheir airhead sister Dorothy. Separately they move across Europetoward England and an apocalyptic resolution, dodging such topicaland emblematic pitfalls of their half of the century as terrorists,Eurocash, Hollywoodspeak, megabytes, punk rockers and Muslims whohave it in for a long-dead poet:Outraged believers in IslamabadDemanded filthy Dante's executionOutside the US Embassy. A sadAnd academic voice poured a cold douche onA hot imam. Iranian leaders hadAs yet not issued a stern resolutionAbout the doing of the sinner in.That would come with a later bulletin.This is all great fun, and it should not cast a schoolmasterishpall on the proceedings to point out that Byrne is written almostentirely in ottava rima, an eight-line stanza that was a favoriteform of Lord Byron. The rhyme scheme is abababcc, which affordsBurgess a wide canvas upon which to commit rhymes by turns ingenious,hilarious and outrageous: "Calvin/bivalve in," fish an/technician,""Sacher-Masoch/cassock."Burgess makes heavy use of the trick of interior split rhyme,and somehow gets away with it, as in:Unseasonable warmth possessed the land. Rheu-Matically wincing but intrepidHe made for Curzon Street. His bare right hand drewA hanky out, to wipe. . . .It does help to be familiar with British pronunciation, forBurgess loves to send up his own plummy high-class London dialect.Listen to this:Dorothy paid, and Timothy could see at aDistance that her tip displeased the cabbie,Entering first the coruscating theatreHe saw a well-dressed crowd, while he was shabby...And you absolutely must have an abridged dictionary close tohand. Burgess rhymes "Christmas" with both "rhotacismus" (a tendencyto use "s" for "r," once common among people who spoke Latin) and"strabismus" (crossed eyes).But this erudition pays off almost every time, as with thiscouplet:Even if he'd dressed clerical, not laicHe knew dog collars weren't apotropaic.I want to quote more, especially Burgess' ribaldries, but thisis a family paper. Suffice it to say that even if you understandjust half and have to scramble, this banquet's well worth the candle.
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