Word: burgesses
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...VISION OF BATTLEMENTS by Anthony Burgess. 241 pages. Norton...
...Anthony Burgess, also an English Catholic satirist, tells of a painful, three-year tour of duty on Gibraltar during and after the end of World War II. There he suffered not only the unrewarding frustrations of rear-echelon soldiering, but also the discovery-agonizing for a young man-that his vocation for music was, if not false, secondary to an untested talent for writing. The result might well have been a damp dollop of self-pity; A Vision of Battlements is anything but that. It is a high-spirited cadenza amid the brassy cacophony of war, played by a born...
...line of the novel. The initials of Ennis' corps, A.V.C., are an acronym of the opening lines of the Aeneid-Arma virumque cano. Ennis is intended to be seen as Aeneas, founder of the Roman race after the fall of Troy. The mock heroics are well sustained, though Burgess now modestly sees the Virgilian parallel as a "tyro's method of giving his story a backbone," as Joyce used the Odyssey to underpin Ulysses. But Burgess is not Virgil any more than Joyce was Homer. His hero loses nothing by being a comic rather than a classic...
...Vision of Battlements is a book to be read twice-once allegro and once more with allegory added. It is perhaps the conflict between classic fate and Christian eschatology which made the book so painful to Novelist Burgess that he suppressed it for so long. Yet he must have known that on the surface it was an amazingly successful first novel, showing his later power to move into the past with Nothing like the Sun, his Elizabethan tour de force, or the Orwellian future with The Clockwork Orange (TIME, Feb. 15, 1963). Burgess has said that he was surprised...
...easily the best ball handler in the backcourt with Gene Dressler, George Neville, Bob Beller, and Jeff Grate. With this depth, Harvard can afford to press and probably wear down Neuman and Pawlak. Besides, if Penn is able to get the ball downcourt Tom Mallison (6-10). Frank Burgess (6-9), and John Hellings (6-8) can murder Harvard under the boards...