Word: malayanizing
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Burgess's story matters because he survived to become one of England's most important postwar novelists. It entertains because it is crammed with odd, intriguing information: recipes for old-fashioned Lancashire dishes, Malayan expressions for a variety of sexual acts, the crotchety digressions of an inexhaustibly curious mind. "I suppose," Burgess writes, "that a novelist who produces an autobiography has a right to expect that most of its readers will also be readers of his fiction." In this case, he is wrong. People who have never heard of Anthony Burgess, much less John Burgess Wilson, can easily find this...
...Malayan, Scythian, Teuton, Kelt, and Slav...
...late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, the Far East Command directed a bloody but successful campaign against Communist guerrillas in the Malayan jungles. As late as 1965, when Indonesia was waging a new guerrilla war against Malaysia, Britain met the threat by maintaining a force of 70,000 men in the area. "But for the forces of the Far East Command during the years of confrontation," said Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, "it would have been a very different Southeast Asia." The annual cost of $630 million proved too great, however, and in 1966 Harold Wilson...
...glory of the book is its language. H. Hatterr, the hero and narrator, is the son of a European merchant and a Malayan lady. Orphaned in India, he ran away from his mission orphanage, taking with him the mission funds and three books-an English dictionary, a Latin primer, and a French primer. With this start he educated himself, taught himself English, but an English far superior to any he could have learned in school, a wild soaring English free of the dullness of grammatical conventions and "standard" usage. His is an English precise and exact, but exuberantly alive...
...eradicates many of Powell's figurants. The ditching of the Yugoslav Chetnik Leader Mihailovich in favor of Tito costs the life of Peter Templer, one of Jenkins' oldest friends (and a veteran of novel No. 1, A Question of Upbringing), who fought with the wrong partisans. The Malayan debacle takes another of Powell's veteran characters, Charles Stringham, P.O.W. and presumed dead. The officer indirectly responsible for the orders that killed both men turns out to be the egregious Kenneth Widmerpool, whose fatuous careerism and brassbound egotism have provided veins of comedy running through all nine books...