The impulse to attempt them is easy to understand. Stories which bring in two world wars or the coming eco-crisis or the sunset of Empire must break unities of space or time. These books try for the global range and include by reference and implication huge volumes of contemporary history. The plot sometimes creaks, though no more loudly than John Spurling’s The Ragged End or Ben Elton’s eco-farce Stark. And the complication has its inherent charm – words and percussion-playing are, after all, interesting in their own right. You do not believe there is an actual town beyond the proscenium but it serves to remind you how complicated a real town is. Burgess’s densely referential style helps this to happen rather in the way a realistic set suits some plays. In Any Old Iron facts and characters stick together well enough for larger themes to develop through them. Some reviewers of Anthony Burgess’s new novel say it has curdled: ‘so let’s say he does know all Walton’s percussion parts by heart, and has the Hebrew or the Russian word for almost anything, is he able to use them to tell a better story?’ I think he is. When fiction curdles, and globules of pure fact rise to the surface, the dishomogeneity annoys. The transition from mixture to emulsion in fiction (or in mayonnaise) is magical.
0 kommentar(er)
