The Real Life of Anthony Burgess
by Andrew Biswell
Picador, HK$150
Can anyone under 40 recall a book by Anthony Burgess? Well done for A Clockwork Orange, published in 1962 to little notice and made famous by the 1971 Stanley Kubrick film. Now reflect that by his death in 1993, Burgess had written 33 novels (the first in 1956, aged 39), a huge two-volume autobiography said by novelist and critic William Boyd to be Burgess' best fiction, reams of poetry and music, book reviews - 350 in one two-year period - and uncountable columns of journalism. Burgess dominated the British literary scene for 30 years. Andrew Biswell's scholarly biography The Real Life of Anthony Burgess, with a good section on A Clockwork Orange, brings a measure of order to the chaos, not least sifting for truth among Burgess' tall tales. It follows, and in many ways is complemented by, the eviscerating but bitchily amusing Anthony Burgess (2002) by Roger Lewis, who decided his subject was a liar and a fraud. Burgess has been called 'one of the most prodigiously gifted European writers and critics in the second half of the 20th century', and a 'comic grotesque'. Perhaps he was both.