Books: The Riddle of Reality

THE DOCTOR IS SICK by Anthony Burgess. 261 pages. Norton. $4.50.

In 1959 British Novelist Anthony Burgess flew home from Brunei, where he had spent five years as an educational consultant to the Sultan, to undergo examination for a suspected tumor of the brain. The suspicion proved baseless, and after six weeks in London’s National Hospital, Burgess was released, sound as a pound. In most men, the experience would have produced no more than a sigh of relief. In Burgess, it excited the wild flight of imagination that produced this novel.

It opens in a hospital ward, where the gauze bandages turbaning every head suggest that the patients all have something wrong up there. In the case of Patient Edwin Spindrift, a Ph.D. and lecturer on linguistics, this seems to be indisputably so. His libido is dead. Ink smells like peppermint to him, hot fat like violets. At the least provocation, Spindrift takes off on obsessive journeys to the roots of words. “What’s the difference between ‘gay’ and ‘melancholy’?” asks the doctor. “One is monosyllabic, the other tetrasyllable,” Spindrift begins. “One is of French, the other of Greek derivation.” And so on.

No Shelter. Fed like a pulsating dinner into the maw of investigative machinery, processed by robots in white coats, Spindrift nurses a wholly rational resentment of his conversion into a thing. “I don’t think you really believe we’re human beings at all,” he protests to the young woman wiring his head to an electroencephalograph. “Do you mind?” she says. “I’ve got my work to do.” This is clearly no place for a clear head. With his skull still gleaming from a preoperative shave, Spindrift swipes a wardrobe and steals back into the world.

It is not the world he left or ever knew, but a fun-house mirroring unac-customed images: Ippo the sandwich man; two German whores who dispense their favors in duo; a flagellant with the implausible name of Bob Courage, who invites Edwin to whip up a little fun.

In this distorted ambiance, the words that once sheltered Spindrift shelter him no more. To his gathering surprise, the world that exists behind the word is a far more rewarding place. His liberated spirit plunges into the joys of stealing library books, winning a baldheaded contest and resurrecting his libido.

Restored in the end to his hospital bed, Spindrift ponders, along with the reader, the ageless riddle of reality. Do Ippo and the others owe their existence to the anesthesiologist? Did he surprise Sheila, his unfaithful wife, in flagrante delicto? Was the tumor removed? Was there a tumor? Uncertain and yearning to know, he ventures out again and at once bumps into Ippo, a walking advert for JOE’S ALL-NIGHT SAUSAGES.

Prime Vintage. A late-blooming novelist whose thoughts invariably run deeper than his plots, Burgess, 49, seems to be rekindling the nominalist argument that ignited scholars in the Middle Ages: Does a thing achieve reality only after it has a name?

Answers are not vital to the enjoyment of Burgess, who heaps on surface treasures of great antic richness that to plunge too far below them carries the risk of reducing their flavor. In other novels—A Clockwork Orange, A Vision of Battlements, Honey for the Bears—Burgess demonstrated truly impressive staying power: once read, a Burgess novel is never quite forgotten. It sticks to the palate like a good wine. The Doctor Is Sick, published in England six years ago, is of the prime Burgess vintage and has only improved with age.