Review of M/F by Anthony Burgess

 

When I was in high school, first becoming serious about books, Anthony Burgess was a big name. It can be surprising to realize how literary culture has changed since then; in 1982 the Philadelphia Inquirer listed the American writers most likely to endure and read by future generations: Saul Bellow, John Updike, John Cheever, E.B. White, John Gardner, Bernard Malamud, Joseph Heller,Isaac Bashevis Singer, James Michener, and J. D. Salinger.

Burgess is best known for A Clockwork Orange; at least in my opinion, his best books are Earthly Powers and the Enderby books. Burgess is an author worth reading if you enjoy what is now called literary fiction.

I just finished reading his 1971 novel M/F. There are two important things to know about this book: incest is a major theme, and the language is quite extraordinary. (I see the influence of James Joyce.) M/F reminds me of Vladimir Nabokov's Ada or Ardor; an excellent book that will also challenge your vocabulary and expand your brain.

Instead of a more traditional review, I thought I would just quote twenty sentences, one from each chapter of the book.

Keteki, crane like in body, owlheaded, ululating a mostly unintelligible lecture, with the smell of scotch as a kind of gloss (p. 6).

The drink was green and frothy with a faint bite of angostura under the saccharine (p. 16).

As for me, whom she called a pretty boy, it was not drink I wanted to get in, on, in, out, off, out, off, with some of those high denomination bills she had in her handbag (p. 29).

I looked with sick fascination at the pink airy mound, grossly warted with large unsucculent halves of stippled berries (p. 51).

It meant as little as being -- but this was a bond with her, I could not deny that this was a sort of bond -- born of an incestuous union (pgs. 56-7).

It was the lion face of some grotesque ultimate leprosy, framed in an ironically indulged piebald mane (p. 77).

I waited, sipping in apprehension still not clearly defined, while the parrot tried out a hiccup ineptly then abandoned the phonic project in a highpitched matingcall scream (p. 87).

The office was clean and simple, as if to disavow the dirtiness that was evidently going on, in a complex montage of allomorphs, in the cells and interrogation rooms behind the plastic strip curtain (p. 92).

From the festal bray of the band, which suggested the heraldic posing of animals and insincere teeth and cordial armwaves of mahouts and whipmen, it was clear that the audience would soon be flooding out (p. 114). 

The golden mean oblong of the doorway let in golden sun that, like a swimming bath, one was not urgently concerned with replunging into for the next minute or so (p. 127).

I shuddered at the conformist order of Craig Road, where a supermarket was the sole provisioner of an endless double of overcleanlooking semidetacheds, a long flat treeless ribbon where the sun was dismally naked (p. 140).

Soon the film settled to New York smartness and wit, with the eggfaced women in paddedshouldered suits wisecracking at sleek mustached men in doublebreasteds who had cocktail cabinets in huge society lawyers’ offices with a vista of Manhattan (p. 146).

There was a big pop-art poster whose crude yellows and blues were an obscenity and whose design was as flaccid as a two-year-old’s penis -- concentric circles, lowercase Gothic letters exhibited as asemiological artifacts in a kind of illiterate glee (p. 156). 

Catherin had a dressing gown on now, an unseductive dark brown cerement associated with up-patients in state hospitals, constellated with the souvenirs of old meals (p. 166). 

My boldness had the panache of desperation, which is, after all, the usual state of mind of the artist (p. 176).

The nuance of contempt came ill from so poor a poet. Then an orchestral crash of despair made my body shake  (p. 196).

It was my duty really to give the assembly, on this final or postfinalappearance, the randy rank nasty quiddity of that dead useless boy, but somehow I hadn’t the heart, man (p. 204).

The lovely creatures, with their frowning eyes that meant no enmity and their cruel flukes that would tear without malice, in a multiple whisper of wings soared, towered, ooked down for the familiar catered perch that was not therem and were kept on the wing, circling, circling, soothed into the empty action by a new warbling from their mistress’s throat (p. 223).

May I say how glad I am to see you looking for connections, tightening bolts that aren’t there, soldiering on despite your manifest weariness, hammering away at structures (p. 232).

I enjoy the movement of life -- kids falling in love, performing birds (there was an article on Aderynthe Blind Bird Queen in a popular periodical just after she died), new gelato flavors, ceremonies, anthills, poetry, loins, lions, the music of the eight tuned Chinese pipes suspended from an economically carved and highly stylized owl head at our window and facing the lake maddened unto the sweetest cacophony by a tramontana that will not abate its passion, the woman below calling her son in (his name is Orlando and she says his father will be furioso), the ombrellone on our roof terrace blown out of its metal plinth, the spitted faraone for dinner tonight with a bottle of Menicocci, anything in fact that’s unincestuous (p. 242).