1985 is neither feathery nor amusing; but it is a truly bad book. I'm afraid no amount of "plumping up" would save it; indeed, one wishes the prolific Mr. Burgess had thought better of it and left this one in the locked and darkened drawer.

That 1985 is so very bad is curious as well as disappointing. One would think Burgess the very man to take on Orwell….

Finding the modern world so dangerous and inhospitable a place, it is not surprising that Burgess and Orwell cast quick, backward glances to seemingly safer, more sensible times…. Burgess and Orwell can only look stonily, warily ahead; and the shape they give us of things to come is distinctly unpleasant. Orwell left us with 1984, that dark and looming prophecy of totalitarianism. And Burgess has churned out a series of what he chooses to call "cacotopian" (from GK Kakos bad + topos place) novels—A Clockwork Orange, The Wanting Seed, and, now, the unfortunate 1985.

While Burgess's earlier utopian fictions are highly imaginative, they are also curiously limited. The Wanting Seed is set in a distant future of the Perpetual Peace…. [This] novel obviously affords Burgess room to be clever and amusing; but it is hardly thought-provoking. Ideas, as all too often in Burgess's books, are slippery, few, and far between.

A Clockwork Orange is better known and a better book. Some readers, overpowered by the Kubrick film version, may believe Burgess has written a flip testimonial on behalf of mindless, juvenile violence. But the novel is actually a quite serious setting out of the author's argument in favor of free will whatever the consequences. It is Burgess's fictional lashing of Skinnerism and the possibility of automatic virtue…. Far better, says Burgess, to tolerate senseless aggression than to deny individual choice and so make a mockery of morality. "Die with Beethoven's Ninth howling and crashing away or live in a safe world of silly clockwork music." That is the choice Burgess stakes out for us again and again in his fiction; he will return to it in 1985.

The author himself admits that Clockwork is not a very good book—"too didactic, too linguistically exhibitionist," he has said of it. But whatever its limitations, it does at least grapple with the serious ideal of the "free and fully human life." Orwell would have politely applauded. Given Burgess's sensitivities to, his temperamental affinities for, Orwell's real concerns, why has he gone so stubbornly wrong with 1985? There seems little excuse for the klutzy treatment Orwell receives there. It is difficult to decide which half of the book, criticism or fiction, is the greater disaster. Let's swallow, and take on the critical portion first.

To be blunt, Burgess's critical discussion is a mess, a confused hodgepodge of essays, staged conversations, and "self-interviews" (a clumsy device perhaps best left to Norman Mailer). What emerges is an out-of-focus argument in which Burgess scores occasional points but in the process manages to misunderstand Orwell in a quite remarkable manner. Much of what he chooses to tell us about Orwell's novel is belabored and not particularly helpful. Burgess spends a good deal of energy rooting out the real-life sources of Orwell's fictional creation; his object is to convince us that 1984 is largely a "melodramatization" of the world of 1948…. Burgess concludes that 1984 is a "comic transcription of the London at the end of World War Two," that what Orwell has given us is hardly a forecast of the future but really only "an exaggerated picture of a bad time."

Just as we are about to yell "rot" and "nonsense," Burgess admits that, of course, there must be more to 1984 than mere exaggeration and transcription. But he has a difficult time telling us what that "more" is. Perhaps if he spent less space on the sources of minutiae and told us more about the sources of Orwell's ideas, his critique would be less tiresome and more enlightening…. It is Burgess's purpose to persuade us that 1984 is not prophecy but a "testimony of despair."… Burgess hasn't done his homework well enough to compel our agreement. What comes crashing is his own tottering critical enterprise. It will not stand. The case is simply not made.

We turn to the novel with hopes that Burgess can bring off there what he so notably fails to accomplish with his criticism. But in his fiction, Burgess is content to do what he mistakenly accuses Orwell of doing in 1984, "melodramatizing," giving us only an exaggerated picture of a bad time. (p. 9)

The novel is a bomb. It is badly conceived and pedestrianly executed. The familiar Burgess rant against the deplorable state of modern industrial life is all there. But what could be amusing in the Enderby novels seems only shrill and querulous here. But then Enderby was an engaging character; Bev Jones is hardly a "character" at all. Burgess has forsaken his fictional talents and turned his hero into a tire some mouthpiece forever…. Burgess should know by now that for his didacticism to be effective, his fiction must minimally hold the reader. It does not.

But Orwell wasn't much of a novelist either. What then is the telling distinction between 1984 and 1985? Put simply, it is that where Burgess gives us a catalogue of irritants, Orwell offers us ideas. Not that Orwell couldn't turn cranky from time to time; he could and did. But Burgess all too often, and especially in this latest work, seems just a crank. "Permissiveness," the closed shop, television, homosexuality, abortion, terrorism, women's lib, frisking at airports, all are grit in Burgess's eye. But behind the irritation there's little insight. As Bertrand Russell noted at the time of its publication, 1984 is that rare occurrence, a philosophical novel. 1985 proves how rare, for Burgess's book contains hardly any ideas at all. The difference is primarily one of political vision. Orwell has it; Burgess does not.

One can agree or disagree with Orwell's brand of socialist politics, think his fictional "prophecy" foolish or prescient. But the vision of 1984 is at least whole and terrifyingly clear. Burgess's version, however, is all a muddle, in 1985 Burgess labels himself a "Hebreo-Helleno-Christian humanist." What does this mean? Your guess is as good as his. At times, Burgess sounds like an old-fashioned bully Tory; he's worried, he tells us, about the dangers of too much equality and forced "levelling." And while it's good to have National Insurance, "what happens," he wants to know, "to the exercise of charity? We can't be kind to the poor when the state kills the very concept of poverty." If this is Christian humanism, spare us please.

Burgess's politics center around a confused mix that he identifies as half romantic, half reactionary. Unfortunately, neither strain, as revealed in 1985, makes much sense. Burgess's chant, like that of the Savage in Brave New World, is for God, poetry, danger, freedom, sin. And any and all of these are liable to be lumped together to produce some peculiar statements…. This is certainly romantic, but it is also adolescent. And then there is his notion of the possibility of uniting culture and anarchy, a thought that also surfaced, you'll recall, in A Clockwork Orange, there in the form of Alex, the Beethoven-loving street thug. Here, in 1985, the ideal, as one gang member puts it, is to "Read Virgil and then rip some guy up." Is Burgess serious about any of this? Apparently, at least some of the time, he is. As a "reactionary," he believes not only in denying progress and "the engines of enforced improvement," but also in cherishing man's "unregenerate nature."

What does this "romantic reaction," this idiosyncratic and fragmented mixture of Burgess's finally lead to? Sometimes to nice, even useful distinctions, more often to genuine nonsense…. What it does not lead to, evidently, is any clear or focused political sense.

Burgess's confused politics cause some disharmony between his novel and his criticism. Nowhere is this discordance more apparent than in his treatment of the workers. In the first half of 1985, Burgess bitterly castigates Orwell for the very creation of the proles. It was Orwell's inherited class consciousness, he argues, that led him insultingly to compare the workers to sturdy animals, his guilt that caused him either to romanticize or sentimentalize the proles…. What Burgess and the others conveniently ignore is that, by design, there are no real or fully human characters in 1984. There are only madmen, automatons, and a variety of half-persons like Winston Smith—whose struggle is, as he himself tells us, precisely to become more and more human. The proles, though far from whole, are at least endowed with privacy, with common sense, with compassion and decency. As such, they are more human than Winston, Julia, O'Brien, or any other figure in the novel. Orwell's choice of inhuman metaphors to describe them—he compares them to animals, birds, plants inexorably seeking the light, blocks of granite, etc.—is in no way demeaning. The metaphors carry the message (admittedly a romantic one) of endurance against all odds.

That Burgess should commit such a common critical error concerning the proles is perhaps surprising but not in itself alarming. The alarm comes after one has read the novel-half of 1985. Burgess does without proletarian metaphors, but his own portrait of the workers is both demeaning and damning; amazingly, he seems not to realize it. In 1985 the workers are feckless, greedy, and stupid. For Burgess to vehemently protest Orwell's creation and then offer us his own slighting vision reveals an egregious blankness, an astounding obtuseness. Does the right hand know what the left is up to? Apparently not. (pp. 9-10)

The pity of all this confusion is that Burgess thinks, apparently, that he sees the workers steadily and fairly, without guilt and without class consciousness. There's really no difference between us and them, he democratically announces. But the only equality Burgess allows is an equality of baseness. "We are all, alas, much the same, i.e., pretty horrible." Alas, the reactionary in him seems to have nastily triumphed over the romantic.

It would do little good to dwell further on political blankness and bumbling in 1985. The truth, of course, is that Burgess is not much interested in politics…. He is, as he himself admits, a "linguistic exhibitionist." He loves to play with language and flaunt his considerable expertise. It's all very clever and all very ostentatious. If you're a Nabokov, such showing off, such knowledgeable playfulness, can take you a long way. But Burgess is no Nabokov. His linguistic acrobatics can produce stumbles as well as delight. That the youth gangs of 1985 speak Latin is explained well enough as an arcane protest of the utilitarian education the state forces upon them. But their use of Swahili slang makes no more sense here than did the Russianized vocabulary of Alex and friends in A Clockwork Orange. More to the point, compare the appendices on Newspeak in 1984 and on WE (Workers' English) in 1985. Orwell is interested in thought, in the use of language to control consciousness and enforce political orthodoxy. Newspeak is a clever invention, but we never forget that there is a point to the cleverness. Burgess is clever too; but, as the appendix makes clear, he is more interested in phonemes than in politics, in dazzling us with linguistic footwork than in throwing any hard or thoughtful punches.

1985 is an unfortunate book for Burgess. It necessitates a close comparison with Orwell, and the comparison is anything but flattering. In fact, it shows him at his worst. Orwell was a bad novelist, yet he managed to write a far better book than Burgess shows himself capable of here. Orwell was not the most original or powerful thinker; but next to him, Burgess appears a true lightweight. Despite Burgess's assault, 1984 still stands and will last; 1985 will get what it deserves—a merciless and quick remaindering. (p. 10)