320
WILLIAM H. PRITCHARD
the reader as
if
this is what he might expect from any ordinary
paragraph of any novel, leisurely developing itself.
There is some question as to what is developing. The Plot, of course.
The book jacket pitches for inclusiveness: all the furniture of Bond
(or is it parody of Bond, who cares?) ; all the disenchantment of a spy
who comes in from the cold; characters who outshine their screen
counterparts-like the villainous information-monger Mr. Theodorescu:
"His hands were richly ringed, but this did not seem vulgar: they were
so
big, strong and groomed that the crusting of winking stones was
rather like adornment by transitory flowers of acknowledged God-given
instruments of skill and power and beauty. His body was so huge that
the white dinner-jacket was like a moulded expanse of royal sailcloth.
He was drinking what Hillier took to be neat vodka, a whole gill of it."
-Sidney Greenstreet can barely live up to that. Nor can another
creator of secret agents with whom Burgess has been compared, Graham
Greene, whose Confidential Agent feels this upon disembarking in a
foreign country: "Danger was part of him. It wasn't like an overcoat
you sometimes left behind; it was your skin. You died with it; only cor–
ruption stripped it from you." By contrast, here is Burgess' hero, prepar–
ing to land at Yarylyuk:
The horror was that he had no plan. He faced his fate, the fat
laughers on deck their fun. There was always something inimical
about the approach of land after long days at sea, ... It was
like the intrusion of the sforzandi of hearty visitors into the quiet
rhythms of a hospital ward, or like the switching on of a raw
electric bulb as the cosy afternoon of toe-toasting in the shadows,
by the hypnotic cave of a Sunday fire, became church-going
evening. . . . A dog barked somewhere in comforting inter–
national language. Tamburlaine and his sons, shabby in washed–
out worker's blue, looked up at the British ship: cruel Tartar
faces with
papirosi
burning under ample moustaches.
The abstract exercise of comparing Burgess with Fleming, or Le Carre
or Graham Greene is plausible only by neglecting what makes all the
difference, and what even Sidney Greenstreet was seldom provided
with: a style that makes "horror" into an alliterative jingle ("faced ...
fate . . . fat . . . fun"), that reaches for the metaphor
juste
in an un–
abashed public-addressed way, then settles for the dog's bark and
Tamburlaine's glance.
The question is how or whether this style can express the eschato–
logical meanings Burgess seems to want it to. There is a good deal of
talk about History being a bloody mess, the modern world a terrible
