Word: burgesses
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Having written some 50 books during the past 30 years, Anthony Burgess has no urgent need to prove that he is prolific. Nevertheless, a scant three months after the U.S. publication of The Pianoplayers, his 29th novel, here comes the first volume of Burgess's autobiography. It is, the author admits in a preface, "longer than I intended, and I foresee that the projected second and last volume -- whose title will probably be You've Had Your Time -- will be as long, if not longer." Shortly after this promise to produce roughly 1,000 pages of printed prose about himself...
That statement hardly sounds like an inducement to rush out and buy Little Wilson and Big God. Yet writers' autobiographies are generally less interesting for the quantity of their experiences than for the quality of their remembering. By this standard, Burgess has plenty to tell indeed...
...that his life, or the first 42 years of it covered here, has been uneventful. In early 1919, around the time of Burgess's second birthday, his mother and older sister died of Spanish influenza. His father, on a furlough from the British army, walked into his Manchester lodgings on a horrid scene: "I, apparently, was chuckling in my cot while my mother and sister lay dead on a bed in the same room." At the end of Little Wilson and Big God, on a Christmas holiday in 1959, the author is told that he has an inoperable brain tumor...
...Britain sex is lethal, while it seems that spying, though regrettable, can be lived with. A series of sensational double agents at high levels of British intelligence, including Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt, never seriously rocked the British ship of state. But sex scandals have regularly felled British political figures, from War Secretary John Profumo in 1963 to Conservative Party Deputy Chairman Jeffrey Archer last year...
That she does, later, as a lady of pleasure, madam and finally founder of an international chain of Schools of Love. But Ellen's experiences are no more colorful than her manner of reporting them. Burgess turns his heroine's "Uneducated English" into a marvelously supple and comic tool of exposition. When she recalls the job that finally did her father in, a pianoplaying marathon in Blackpool, Ellen tries to give some sense of Billy's repertoire during his last 15 days at the keyboard; several pages of song titles follow, including Beethoven's Mignonette in G, the Pilgrim...