Last man
Francis King
1985 Anthony Burgess (Hutchinson £4.95)
Since it is as a reviewer of fiction that I am retained by this paper, I hope that there will be no demarcation-dispute if I deal with all 240 pages of Anthony Burgess's latest work, instead of with only 116. The remain ing 124 non-fiction pages are devoted to a largely hostile critique of George Orwell's 1984, with digressions on such subjects as Bakunin and his disciples, the author's own The Clockwork Orange and the nature of love; and, briefly, as a coda, to a discussion of 'Worker's English' (i.e. English based on the concept, not of 'correctness', but of usage as the only law).
Since the critique of Orwell comes first, I shall deal with it first. Burgess sees 1984 as a novel that tells the reader far more about 1948 than about the future. At that time people were afflicted with a general weariness and a sense of privation; they were also disillusioned with the inefficiency, crassness and arrogance of a Socialist government that had been elected to create a Utopia. Orwell shared in these feelings and they are everywhere reflected in his novel.
But in reaching this assumption — with which I have no quarrel — Burgess is guilty of some inaccuracies. If, for example, Orwell ever declared that he had intended to give 1984 the title 1948, I can find no documentary evidence for it. What he did consider as an alternative title was 'The Last Man in Europe'. Again, Burgess seems unaware that 1984 was conceived as far back as 1943 and that it was completed in rough draft in 1947. Nor is it correct to say that in 1949 'the meat-ration was down to a couple of slices of fatty corn-beef' and one egg, usually bad, each month; or that you could not get cigarettes. (Orwell himself, in fact, notes in a letter of the time that he was smoking 6oz of tobacco per week.) Elsewhere, Burgess writes of the reception of 1984 as having been 'tepidly laudatory' and declares that only Bertrand Russell realised that it was a philosophical novel. But, in reality, it received a literary award from the Partisan Review, became Evening Standard Book of the Month and was selected by the American Book of the Month Club; and Julian Symons and Philip Rahv (to name only two reviewers) were quite as discerning as Russell.
Nonetheless, this essay fully demonstrates Burgess's brilliance as a critic; and his three basic judgements about Orwell seem to me irrefutable. The first o. these is that Orwell's vision of the future was wholly wrong; the second that he loved his country more than his party (`There was more English than Socialism in his English Social ism'); and the third that, though he so much wished to be one of the proletariat, it was as impossible for him to effect that transformation as for a man to become a horse.
After this piece of demolition, Burgess gives his own version of what the Eighties will hold for us. In order to enable the economy to survive ever-increasing wage demands and ever-diminishing production, North Sea oil has been totally mortgaged to the Arabs, who now not only own AlDorchester, Al-Klaridges and various Al-Hiltons but have turned London into the commercial centre of Islam. Since the government is powerless in the grip of the unions, Britain has earned the nickname of Tucland. The hero's wife dies in a hospital fire, because the firemen are on strike. Trains fail to run, bakers rarely produce any bread, people suffocate in iron-lungs because of power-cuts. Inflation makes a hotel doorman sneer at a tip of £5. Well, not really so very much different from life in this country now.
Like his hero, who opts out of his union, thus loses his right to work and finally ends up in a mental hospital, Burgess believes passionately in 'the right of man to loneliness, eccentricity, rebellion, genius'; and it is with Swiftian indignation that he lays into the puny levellers who would like to abolish that right. Three cheers!
The last work of fiction that I reviewed in this column was Kingsley Amis's Jake's Thing; and, inevitably, one is tempted to compare two books that take so atrabilious a view on the way our cosy little, crummy little island is going. Amis might well have written Burgess's cod 'Worker's English' version of Hamlet's famous soliloquy, beginning: `To get on with bloody life or not, that's what it's all about really.' He might also have devised the splendid scene in which King Charles III, his ears pink with cold, intervenes in a strike with a series of slangy bromides about 'jumping to it' and 'everything being okay now that the telly will be starting again'.
Essentially, each of these novelists is equally sombre about the future; but whereas Amis's novel is droopily depressing, Burgess's somehow induces exhilaration. This is firstly because Burgess's style is so rampant with intellectual energy and thrust and secondly because his hero, unlike Jake, is perpetually defending values of his own, instead of merely attacking the values of others.
Both authors are published by the same firm. Jake's Thing has, of course, been stick ing out all over the media — carefully examined by the author's own son on tele vision, submitted to thorough diagnosis on radio, handled at length (no hasty tossingoff) in print. Whether this better work by an even finer literary artist will get the same coverage, will be interesting to see. Somehow I doubt it. Rumours of Rain Andre Brink (W. H. ApillaeynmEa5t.e95s) Eva Hanagan (Duckworth
e4.95)
The sight this week of the South African National Party caucus serried around the new occupant of their throne of blood, singing Die Stem' with spine-chilling devotion, reinforced my appreciation of Andre Brink's new novel, which I had just put down. South Africa has produced some of the finest writers of our time, and Brink can't compete with the far-reaching subtleties of Nadine Gordimer or Dan Jacobson. But his book brings new light to the problems of Afrikanerdom; and, while operating from committed despair, he fills in the gaps in my, for one, knowledge of, and grudging sympathy for, their terrible predicament. He contrasts two lives: that of the narrator, Martin Mynharat, opportunist, blinkeredly pragmatic — his hero is Pontius Pilate — working within the system and justifying its continuation on economic grounds, with that of his friend, Bernard, who commits himself to subversion, and is imprisoned for his faith. Brink nearly brings off the difficult feat of implying liberal attitudes through the eyes of a collaborationist character: there is a scene in Soweto which outbids any newsreel for impact. But, more importantly, he shows, with reluctant sympathy, the strengths and roots of ultimate destruction in the entrenched position of the Afrikaners.
Throughout, the question of freedom is discussed: what does it mean, for a black, for a country, for a woman? The responsibility and limitations of being an Afrikaner are constantly contrasted with Martin's personal responsibilities to his family — his big-business wheeling dealing involves selling up the family farm, uprooting his mother from the only world she knows, and to his mistress, who, freefloating, feels the need to 'come to rest for a short time, give myself to some cause, lose myself in something . . . ' He lets her and Bernard down, shamefully; and this refusal to commit himself to anyone or anything up to the hilt points up his emotional barrenness: he can't even accept full Afrikanerdom, though reaping its benefits. 'No man is so completely oppressed by the oppressor as himself' says Bernard at his trial; and, in his picture of a man who is trying to have his cake and his halfpenny, Brink creates a desperate picture. plajImates is a strange, sometimes cloying piece about the relationship between a genteel, retarded old lady, the death of whose sister leaves her puttering about, coping on her own like a lost child. The sometimes gruesome, sometimes perceptive account of her friendship with a small boy who grows up while she lets go, owes something to Harold and Maude and much to Mrs Gasket!.
Mary Hope
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