Books: Dividing Gall into Three Parts

THE END OF THE WORLD NEWS by Anthony Burgess McGraw-Hill; 389 pages; $15.95

Anthony Burgess, 66, has gone out on some strong limbs to avoid repeating himself. Earthly Powers (1980), for instance, presented an aging homosexual writer trying to secure canonization for his friend, a deceased Pope. In his 26th novel and most bizarre work since A Clockwork Orange (1962), the author raises the stakes in his gamble for freshness. The End of the World News offers a trio of plots linked by irony and caustic satire.

Burgess describes this fiction as an “entertainment” rather than a novel. In a dust-jacket blurb he announces that the discovery of the unconscious, the possibility of universal socialism and man’s ability to live in outer space are the century’s “three greatest events.” The End of the World News (the BBC news readers’ sign-off phrase) amplifies those themes with a twist, and it is a twist of the dial. Reading, says the author, must reflect the new way of viewing television in the “three-screen family.” Therefore his postliterary trilogy is broken into prime-time vignettes.

Sigmund Freud stars in a segment that seems adapted for Masterpiece Theater. Brownshirted Nazis burst into the Vienna apartment of the founder of psychoanalysis, growling about “rich dirty Jews.” They are cowed by Frau Freud’s response: “We’re middle-class clean Jews. That is why I ask you to wipe your feet.” The master’s cures are just as brisk and effective, the ideal length for docudrama. “You don’t want to die,” Freud assures a patient, “you want to get back into your mother.” From the couch comes the reply, “You’re sure?” The doctor is, and one visit later, so is his patient.

In Burgess’s eyes, Freud is a Victorian Job, plagued by the doctrinal defections of Carl Jung, Otto Rank and his own daughter Anna. The therapist’s love of cigars, which contribute to the carcinoma that kills him, is analyzed by Jung. The Swiss tells Freud’s mother that Sigmund’s smoking is “sheer devotion … to you, gnadige Frau. ”

On another channel, Leon Trotsky visits New York City in 1917 to rouse the American proletariat. Burgess tells this story in the form of a libretto for a Broadway musical, complete with lyrics. Trotsky falls for Olga, a hardheaded party worker, while his wife cavorts with a wealthy socialist. Four hearts beat as one until the revolutionary’s son is reported missing. Trotsky’s life is changed forever when he is reunited with the boy, and the songs turn as sentimental as the story. At the finale, the hero chants, “Family’s first,/ Love is completeness,/ Power’s a burnt-out star./ To redeem with | sweetness/ The cursed/ Things we all are,/ Family’s first—/ By °far!”

A different kind of burnout looms Over the Commonwealth of the Democratic Americas in A.D. 2000, as Burgess plays with a well-known science fiction theme. An iron-heavy planet, code-named Lynx, threatens to vaporize the earth in this third and most complete tale. Valentine Brodie, a jittery, lustful, heavy-drinking young “future fiction” writer, is to accompany a space ark populated by an elite, computer-selected group of scientists and thinkers. They have been chosen to carry civilization to the next world. Brodie, like Freud, is fond of cigars, panatellas called Solzhenitsyns. He is also fond of a fat, fast-talking actor named Willett. At a last dance high above the flooded streets of Manhattan, Brodie decides to go down with the earth: “Faces sweated in candleshine, bodies swung, turned, swayed … To hell with that cold contrived … spaceship horror.”

But in a sober moment, he decides that Willett is Falstaff and that he, Brodie, is Prince Hal, about to come of age. What better place to reach maturity than on a spaceship traveling for lightyears? With the help of a couple of Mafia gunsels and a casino owner named Dashiel Gropius, the “futfic” author assumes command of the spaceship as it blasts into the galactic void. In the infinity that awaits, Val will be a “being warm, wayward, imperfect, adaptable.”

That description could serve the author of these tales as well. After blastoff, the fictional narrator who has combined the “televisualized” Freud, the tin-pan Trotsky and the Shakespearean Star Trek starts to muse. In the future, as in the past, he decides, only one question has real pertinence: What aspects of civilization are worth carrying on? One implicit answer: the ability to wring harmony from dissonance, to create a work of the imagination from disparate and unpromising materials. Example: The End of the World News, a trio made from the detritus of history and scifi.

True, the author has abused his poetic license; he is often perverse for perversity’s sake, and he can be more outrageous than illuminating. Even so, he has produced a highly original volume—his 41st book in 27 years. Carry on, Burgess.

—ByJ.D. Reed