Volume 36, Number 5 · March 30, 1989
The Revel's Ended
By Denis Donoghue
Any Old Iron
by Anthony Burgess
Random House, 360 pp., $19.95
'If this were a novel and not a record of historical fact…,' we read on page 223 of Any Old Iron. But it is a novel, and while it alludes to many historical facts it is not a 'historical novel.' It refers to many historical figures major and minor, including Chaim Weizmann, Churchill, Eden, Stalin, A. J. Cronin, and an unnamed 'arithmetic teacher with a Spanish name,' whom Irish readers will recognize as Eamon de Valera. But the main concentration of the book is on the invented lives, not the real ones to which Burgess refers in passing. The background of the book, and sometimes the foreground, include wars and other nightmares that occurred in Europe and the Middle East between, roughly, 1910 and 1950, but these are included for their impingement on the fictive characters, not on the real ones. In this respect, Any Old Iron differs notably from Burgess's The Kingdom of the Wicked, a historical novel in which he deals with the emergence of Christianity from a setting that gave no sign of harboring such a thing. His concern in that book was to imagine how Christianity came to occur, as a momentous social event, rather than to concentrate upon the people caught up in it.
Review, 2310 words
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