Word: napoleons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...NAPOLEON SYMPHONY by ANTHONY BURGESS 365 pages. Knopf...
...riches, a kind of conspicuous consumption of exotic plot thickeners, linguistic games, disturbing tragicomedy, Manichaean trampoline acts and Christian and mythological symbolism. Thematically speaking, anything goes-as Burgess demonstrated three years ago in MF, a novel of contemporary incest based on an Algonquin Indian myth. In his latest offering, Napoleon Symphony, the author, who is also a serious composer, has reached for everything from kazoos to pipe organs. The result is a mock epic about the career of Napoleon Bonaparte that sometimes reads like Dickens, sometimes like Tennyson and Wordsworth, with an occasional gash of Gerard Manley Hopkins' gold...
...novel itself is divided into four movements corresponding to the parts of Beethoven's Third Symphony, "The Eroica." (Beethoven originally dedicated "The Eroica " to Napoleon, but tore up the dedication after the First Consul of France crowned himself Emperor.) At times the Burgess Bonaparte resembles a cross between Charles de Gaulle and Douglas MacArthur. At times he is an 18th century Mafia capo trying to manage overextended holdings and control his greedy relatives. Burgess seeks to evoke the heaving spirit of the Napoleonic age by rouging (and noiring) the historical facts with catchy dialogue and fantasy. As he points...
...comes indolent Josephine cuckolding her warrior-husband while he is off subjugating the Mamelukes in Egypt. Then his Empress-the mother of his only acknowledged son-homesick Marie-Louise, who stuffs herself with Austrian chocolate and drinks coffee in clear violation of the Emperor's trade-war embargo. Napoleon's mother, Madame Mere, casts a practical Corsican eye on ephemeral pomp and circumstance, while prudently stuffing gold in her socks. And of course Talleyrand appears, ceaselessly tacking for advantage and trimming his sails at the hint of rough weather...
...broader screen of history, Burgess gets his effects by balancing the horrors of war with some of the absurdities of political power and private weaknesses. Napoleon is at times almost lovable, particularly when he discovers that the people of France are so blinded by the myth of Bonaparte that they do not even recognize him when he chooses to walk the streets as an ordinary citizen. Burgess also locates Napoleon's own blind spots. On drama, for example: "Tragedy must never have chairs on the stage. Tragic characters never sit down." And the Emperor's effort to abolish...