Word: burgess
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LIFE IS A CABARET, death a blast, and apocalypse in Burgess' twenty-sixth novel or "entertainment," as he labels it. Not only is this "very deep" book a "bargain," it will "slip down as easily as a dozen oysters well-sharpened with lemon juice and tobacco," as the author declares in the jacket blurb. The book is really three stories in one. All concern the end of human history adapted for the modern TV viewer. At times The End of the World News is all that its author promises: at times it is merely quirky. But whatever its flaws, this...
...writer fond of doing the unexpected--previous works include A Clockwork Orange, a translation of Oedipus Rex and a sonata--Burgess strives for effect by interweaving the life of Freud, a sci-fi apocalypse, and Trotsky's visit to New York. Styles range from a libretto to a TV-play, at times in utter parody of themselves...
...While Burgess at times lampoons Freud as much as everyone else in the story, he lauds the psychoanalyst's desire to see through the sanitized exterior of his culture to the real nature of man. The slapstick format, occasionally as predictable as the medium it parodies, spares us from excessive psychobabble, presenting instead humanity as it is, not as we would like to perceive it--with the author unmistakably siding with the former...
...genre he never took quite seriously: Lynx, a wandering planet from outer space, is going to smash the earth, ending civilization as we know it. But a plan to salvage humanity, by sending the cream of the race into space to begin a new, brings the story back to Burgess' theme--the question of just what is worthwhile about humanity and the culture we have created. According to the plan, Valentine and his kind might be lost--together with Roundy Kupkakes, Kingfisher, Kingfish in Eggbatter, Shakespeare, Milton, and all of the "dirty delightful world" the hero Brodie considers worthwhile. Instead...
...member of British intelligence during World War II he leaked information to the Soviets. Though he was allowed to continue advising the Queen until his retirement, he privately confessed to British authorities in 1964 that he was the "fourth man" along with three notorious fellow Cambridge traitors: Guy Burgess, who died in Moscow in 1963; Donald Maclean, who died in Moscow last month; and H.A.R. ("Kim") Philby, still living in the Soviet Union...