Product Description

Burgess, argues Roger Lewis, was the writer as faker and prankster who lived, like an actor, by deception and illusion. Tracking his quarry from Manchester to Malaya to Malta to Monte Carlo, Lewis assesses Burgess's struggles and grudges and uncovers the webs of truth and lies. This biography is populated with a cast of drunks, nymphomaniacs, egotists, famous 20th-century authors, and actors.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #590476 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-16
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

Review
'A great genius may appear in almost any disguise; even in the disguise of a successful novelist'. Chesterton

Express, 30 November 2002
Lewis is an intellectual showman, a connoisseur of the arcane, a collector of titillating trivia.

Observer, 1 December 2002
A bloody good read.

Customer Reviews

an egotistical travesty
Roger Lewis's mean-spirited and astonishingly egotistical biography is a travesty. It largely refuses to acknowledge Anthony Burgess's protean talent and wide-ranging artistic achievements. Lewis attempts to nail Burgess as an artistic charlatan masquerading as a great writer, and in the process reveals rather too much about his own personal prejudices and, one strongly suspects, writerly envy. Even the most partisan admirers of Burgess would, I'm sure, recognise the problematic nature of describing his legacy (see, for example, Lorna Sage's excellent obituary piece in her volume of Selected Journalism). Although he rests rather awkwardly in the neatly tended garden of post-war British novelists, it is precisely his European sensibility, its breadth and ambition, which makes him so fascinating a literary outsider. And his wearing of masks, both literary and personal, is all part of the creative fun to be celebrated. Tellingly, many of the minor writers who Lewis cites in support of his critical attacks (John Wain, John Baily etc)are products of the narrow Oxbridge academic world Burgess disdained. And this biographer seems ever anxious to position himself alongside Burgess and Richard Ellmann, exceptional men both. Meanwhile, the level of personal abuse aimed at Burgess just seems nasty and irrelevant to the story. As I reread Lewis's book, I was reminded of the compelling anecdotal evidence of Burgess's outstanding generosity as a journalistic book reviewer and as a teacher. I would warmly recommend Andrew Biswell's biography as the first serious and scholarly account of Burgess.

Stars and Daggers
It is difficult to be enthusiastic about a book full of so much negativity, and footnotes.

Not only are we given relentless detail about what a dreadful man Burgess was, his manifold hang-ups, and personal obnoxiousness, but this biography's author also seems determined to vent his spleen in the reader's general direction.

In what is pretty dense prose in places, the colossal amount of footnotes does nothing to help the reader make sense of the chronology of Burgess' life.

What does emerge is the portrait of a complex human being, which is tantalisingly interesting, but with such sniping from the author at his subject, instead of insight, it seems hardly worth the bother of getting to the end.

A parody of a biography, rather than a biography
Not quite a biography, not a lit crit study either, this extensive demolition job is designed to show that Burgess was "a parody of a great writer, rather than a great writer". Lewis's tone, though, is better conveyed by comments that Burgess was a "self-deluding prick" and generally by his asking at every turn what he hell Burgess thought he was playing at. Unfortuntely the biographer's mateyness is just as contrived as any of his subject's pretentiousness, and his footnotes, which sometimes take up 80 or 90% of a double page, go into great biographical detail about minor characters, which proves just as boring as the worst of Burgess's novels.
To be fair, Lewis is spot-on with most of his criticisms -- but the delivery is unkind, and the impression you're left with is of a hopelessly disillusioned former fan. By the end of the book, he has firmly associated Burgess with inhumanity (without much textual back-up), and with every writer he discusses he finds some common ground with Burgess -- the kiss of death. So Iris Murdoch grew too sentimental, the Elizabethans were "anti-art", the Beats were "evil" - never mind his main subject, Lewis doesn't like anyone else either. The irony is that the inhumanity he has come to loathe in Burgess's books is in evidence nowhere more than in his own work. The use of what he calls, in a different context, a "disillusioned Boswell" means that the book has a real narrative energy, but ultimately the question of why he wanted to spend 20 years writing about a writer he can't stand remains something of a mystery.