A book by Anthony Burgess, fictional or otherwise (and ABBA ABBA is both), is likely to be tricky—and harsh almost to desperation, moving and funny. Also, at times, exasperating: over-insistence and the obvious are a word-player's fatal Cleopatras, sure to engulf him in the mire of horseplay, yet irresistible through their very unattractiveness, perhaps.

Part One is a tale about Keats, dying in Rome, in the care of his friend, Severn. Word-play starts in the title and proliferates speedily. The poet is Junkets, to be eaten by Fairy Mab, disjointed, disjuncted, disjunketed. A resident English sculptor uses the same marble as Michelangelo: 'Ewing in Italy … hewing so prettily'. The quips and cranks range over several languages. (p. 729)

Whether or not it has only one father, this book has many elder brethren: a comic scene between Keats and a drunken Lieutenant Elton reminds one of the early pleasures of Time for a Tiger; Napoleon is also dying, on St. Helena; the excremental shade of Enderby is loose; while much more than Gregory Gregson (a ghost made flesh?) emanates from Beard's Roman Women. Many a by-blow blows by….

But there is a poet in reserve, Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli (1791–1863), amateur actor and minor papal officer, who believes that poetry should be about serious things like 'eternal truths, impressive spiritual essences, God and country'. Keats himself conceives the idea of a long poem in sonnet stanzas about the eternal common Roman, the 'ordinary soul' through the ages, but for obvious reasons the undertaking is not for him. He may have the necessary lack of identity, but he also lacks the dialect and the necessary time.

The muddied cloak passes to Belli, who loses his 'taste for grandiloquence' and in due course (or coarse) writes 2,279 sonnets in the Roman dialect, vulgar and obscene and blasphemous, 'stuff for tavern recitation with the doors closed'….

Part Two introduces us to Joseph Joachim Wilson, great-grandson of the Giovanni Gulielmi who was friend of and intermediary between Keats and Belli. J. J. Wilson was born in 1916—one wonders whether he could be related to John Burgess Wilson, another Mancunian writer—and died in New York in 1959 of injuries received in a mugging. But not before he had translated into Mancunian English a selection of G. G. Belli's sonnets on biblical subjects. Of these translations, printed here, it must suffice to say that they impress more by the ingenuity of their rhyming than by anything else: CD in the extreme, they are miracles of ABBA ABBA…. There can be small doubt that Anthony Burgess is the father of this enlivening and distressing little book. (p. 730)