Anthony Burgess

Publishers Weekly

Lewis, who has chronicled the lives of Peter Sellers and Laurence Olivier, eschews the traditional chronological narrative for a highly stylized, psychodynamic reading of his subjects and their creative work. As it turns out, Anthony Burgess (1917-1994) is ripe for this sort of treatment. Best known for his novel A Clockwork Orange, Burgess was extremely prolific but generally regarded as a great writer who never wrote a great book. Instead, he spread his talents thin (the author of scores of books, he was also a composer, translator and critic) and actively cultivated the myth of his own genius. By this account bombastic, egotistical and sexually eccentric, he responded to even the most profound tragedies of his life with a characteristic intellectual remove and what Lewis terms a "robotic" love of words. Lewis contends that Burgess (born John Anthony Burgess Wilson) was, in fact, several people at once, a "pathological liar" who lived in his books and experienced the world through a refracting set of identities. In perfect schizoid imitation, Lewis captures the Burgess/Wilson kaleidoscope with dramatic tangents, first-person interludes, endless cultural references, overly long footnotes and a charming lack of reverence. While at times Lewis's approach is frustratingly insular, a linear biography could not do this cryptic, difficult figure justice. 8 pages of b&w photos. (Mar. 19) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Lewis, a biographer of both Peter Sellers and Laurence Olivier, presents a spiraling, kaleidoscopic biography of one of the 20th century's most noted authors. While as a novelist he was best known for penning A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess (1917-93) was also a critic, composer, essayist, and translator. He was cheap, caustic, and comedic and was both immersed in the world of literature and yet in almost self-imposed exile from it. This work is based on over 20 years of research, including interviews with the author, and explores Burgess from both biographical and literary angles. Lewis is not known for his straight-line biographies, and this chaotic work is no different. While structured chronologically, it actually moves in and out of the times and places and among the people in the world of Burgess. The text can be difficult to follow as it is packed with footnotes that go off on tangents and events that the author states are made up to illustrate his points, resulting in a lack of narrative drive. Nevertheless, Lewis does bring forth Burgess and his creative demons. Included are some odd but interesting appendixes, such as the syllabus Burgess used while at Manchester University and a set of letters on FIOA requests about the CIA and Burgess. Recommended for academic libraries.-Neal Wyatt, Chesterfield Cty. P.L., VA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Loquacious portraitist Lewis (The Real Life of Laurence Olivier, 1997, etc.) leaves no stone unturned in his obsessive and hardly sympathetic life of the tortured author of A Clockwork Orange. Born in 1917 to a working-class Catholic family in northeast Manchester, John Wilson (his name until his first novel, Time for a Tiger, was published in 1956) lost his sister and mother early to the flu epidemic and grew into an unfeeling, massively egotistical bookworm. His early years as an English teacher married to an unstoppable Welsh dipsomaniac ended with his transformation into Anthony Burgess, pompous polymath of mock scholarship. His thousand-word-a-day writing quota ensued from the famously inaccurate 1959 diagnosis of an inoperable brain tumor; he churned out four novels during the one year he thought he had left and was preoccupied thereafter with afflictions of the body. Later remarried to an Italian countess, Burgess composed more than 30 titles before his death in 1993, ranging from early "jungle novels" about his travels and on to potboilers and copious literary criticism (Joyce, Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, and Shakespeare), as well as Broadway adaptations, screenplays (Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth), and translations. His lurid study of mechanized violence didn't take off until Stanley Kubrick's chilling film version in 1971, and Lewis makes some mischievous revelations about A Clockwork Orange: Burgess lifted the idea from a French translation he had done years before, and the novel supposedly encrypts covert operations the author was allegedly engaged in with Her Majesty's Secret Service. Aiming to situate Burgess in the grand scheme of English-language literary history,Lewis does so magisterially, especially in the chatty, page-long footnotes comparing him to heavyweight contemporaries Graham Greene, Kingsley Amis, and Iris Murdoch, among others. Lewis can forgive his subject for preposterous subterfuges, but can't rid himself of "discomfiture" over Burgess's extreme writerly froideur. Trenchant and dogged, expunging the biographer of a 20-year anxiety of influence.