Volume 21, Number 14 · September 19, 1974
From the Ridiculous to the Ridiculous
By John Bayley
Napoleon Symphony
by Anthony Burgess
Knopf, 366 pp., $7.95
In the fertility of his enterprise, his louche congenial knockabout confidence, Mr. Burgess may remind us of one of those Elizabethan professionals, like Nashe or Deloney, who tried their hands at practically every species of literary composition, always coming up with something readable and rewarding, but curiously unsettling too, as if their freewheeling methods cast a kind of doubt on the more accepted kinds of literary achievement. There is a sense in which The Unfortunate Traveller, for instance, deflates the artificial pretension of The Shepheardes Calender or Venus and Adonis so that we feel—not so much 'Ah, here is life at last,' as 'Why do Spenser and Shakespeare have to go to those lengths to get it into literature?' The effect is deceptive. Burgess, no less than Nashe, is an artificer in his own line, but he does not seem to take us so far from presentness and actuality as do in their various ways James Joyce or Scott Fitzgerald or Saul Bellow or Anthony Powell.
Review, 1846 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |