[Burgess'] sensitivity to the comic potential of English is apparent throughout his novels, and presumably it was increased by his reading of Joyce. He does not use language, in precisely the same ways that Joyce does, but he makes it, along with situation and character, a principal vehicle of comedy. And, like Joyce,… he does not hesitate to go beyond English and devise a tongue suitable for his artistic purposes.

The influence of Joyce can also be seen in the portraiture of several of his protagonists and, to an extent, in the structure of some of his novels. Victor Crabbe in The Long Day Wanes, Paul Hussey in Honey for the Bears, Edwin Spindrift in The Doctor Is Sick, and Tristram Foxe in The Wanting Seed all share a great deal with Leopold Bloom. They are all sensitive, cultured, well-meaning but ineffectual, cuckolded non-heroes involved in non-heroic Odyssean quests which terminate in some sort of return to a mate who has proved herself to be an unfaithful Penelope. The return may or may not involve an actual reunion. In fact, more often than not, the wanderer merely arrives at a heightened understanding of his mate and his relationship to her. The enlightenment gained is usually a dismal and ironic epiphany. (pp. 235-36)

Intense sexual humiliation is an experience many of Burgess' heroes share with Bloom. Many of them, like Crabbe, are cuckolded. Some, such as Edwin Spindrift, Paul Hussey, and Mr. Enderby, are proven impotent. But whereas Bloom recovers from his sexual humiliation and is reunited with Molly in what promises to be a mutually gratifying relationship, Burgess' heroes usually suffer irreparable losses with their humiliations. Paul Hussey, the homosexual protagonist of Honey for the Bears, loses his wife to a lesbian Russian doctor. Mr. Enderby, a poet who has become impotent through prolonged adolescence, loses his lyric gift after a disastrous marriage. Edwin Spindrift, the philologist-hero of The Doctor Is Sick, after a Ulyssean quest through the seamier sections of London, is reunited with his wife only long enough to acknowledge that their marriage is hopeless. The Wanting Seed concludes more happily in this regard, but the reader still wonders how the hero and his wife will rebuild their marriage in the face of odds posed by their situation. (pp. 237-38)

Burgess' representation of human experience has not been universally admired among critics. Yet even among those who have little sympathy with his ideas there are few who would deny his brilliance as a prose stylist. As I have said, he appears to have learned much from Joyce, although he does not do precisely the same things with language that Joyce does. He seldom uses stream-of-consciousness or interior monologue. He rarely employs the Joycean device of juxtaposing radically differing literary styles for comic or ironic effect. But, like Joyce and Nabokov, he is keenly aware of the auditory value of words and is fond of onomatopoeia. A Clockwork Orange is narrated entirely in an invented language which is rich in onomatopoeic suggestion. Inside Mr. Enderby opens with a flatulent statement that is repeated, with modifications, frequently thereafter as a kind of gaseous chorus. And indeed all of his novels are full of gorgeous word play which is best appreciated when the passages are read aloud.

Also, like Joyce, he laces his prose heavily with literary allusion, and he has clearly revealed his impatience with those who feel that this device is not widely appreciated. In The Right to an Answer a dope-smuggling, woman-beating hoodlum justifies his philosophy of life with reference to Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, and Graham Greene. (pp. 238-39)

Burgess teases his readers. His allusive style is both flattering and vexing. A reader must be fairly well read and have some familiarity with classical music in order to fully enjoy his wit and word play. But even as he flatters his readers with the assumption that they have these prerequisites, Burgess play-fully reminds them that their cultural attainments are shared by the lowliest, most depraved dregs of humanity.

Both as satire and linguistic tour de force, A Clockwork Orange is one of Burgess' most brilliant achievements. If one felt compelled to classify it among recognized sub-genres of the novel, he would probably say that Burgess has combined picaresque with Orwellian proleptic nightmare…. The novel's brilliance as a linguistic feat derives from Burgess' very considerable knowledge of languages and phonetics, as well as his keen musician's ear for the rhythmic potential of verbal patterns.

I should perhaps stress that A Clockwork Orange is much more than a linguistic tour de force. It is also probably the most devastating piece of anti-utopian satire since Zamiatin's We. The fact that its satiric direction has been either overlooked or misunderstood by most reviewers points to no fault in the novel. Like Zamiatin and Swift, Burgess satirizes more than one school of utopian thought. His most obvious target is the utopian dream spawned by the behavioral psychologists, such as B. F. Skinner. It may be pure coincidence, but A Clockwork Orange looks very much like a deliberate refutation of Skinner's Walden Two, a novel which is simply a blueprint for a utopia in which most human problems could be solved by a scientific technology of human behavior. The principles of this behavioral technology rest heavily upon the assumption that man is not free…. The citizenry of Skinner's utopia would "feel free" and be totally unaware of any restraint or compulsion. They would, however, be anything but free…. (pp. 239-41)

In his other proleptic nightmare, The Wanting Seed, Burgess presents a horrifying, though richly comic, picture of life in a world freed of the scourge of war but overpopulated beyond Malthus' most fearful imaginings. An awareness of Malthus' demographic theories is essential to a full appreciation of the comedy and satire, but this is surely not too much to expect of the average twentieth-century reader, and it is astonishing that The Wanting Seed, like A Clockwork Orange, has been so completely misunderstood by some critics. All of Malthus' positive and preventive "checks"—through "misery," "vice," and "moral restraint"—are brought into play and it becomes apparent that even in England circumstances could make them much less distinguishable from one another than Malthus assumed. (pp. 243-44)

In addition to splendid multi-pronged satire, The Wanting Seed contains a complete statement and illustration of a cyclical theory of history which Burgess had partially formulated in his first novel, A Vision of Battlements. In that novel an American officer describes how the Pelagian denial of Original Sin had spawned "the two big modern heresies—material progress as a sacred goal; the State as God Almighty." The former has produced "Americanism" and the latter, "the Socialist process." In The Wanting Seed all government history is seen to be an oscillation between two "phases," a Pelagian phase and an Augustinian. When a government is functioning in its Pelagian phase, or "Pelphase," it is socialistic and committed to a Wellsian liberal belief in the goodness of man and his ability to achieve perfection through his own efforts. Inevitably man fails to fulfill the liberal expectation and the ensuing "disappointment" causes a chaotic "Interphase," during which terrorist police strive to maintain order by force and brutality. Finally, the government, appalled by its own excesses, lessens the brutality but continues to enforce its will on the citizenry on the assumption that man is an inherently sinful creature from whom to good may be expected. This pessimistic phase is appropriately named for the saint whose preoccupation with the problems of evil led him, like Burgess, into Manichaeism. During "Gusphase" there is a capitalist economy but very little real freedom for the individual. There is, in fact, only what Professor Skinner would call "a feeling of freedom." (pp. 245-46)

[The Wanting Seed] is a magnificent black comedy, in many ways Burgess' best. He encompasses far more than either Orwell or Huxley do in their famous dystopias, and he is far more entertaining. The novel's only significant flaw proceeds from Burgess' tendency to be too entertaining and too witty. It is full of playful references to his fellow-novelists and other literary figures. There is, for example, the description of the bearded giant atop the Government Building which is identified from time to time with various figures of cultural and political importance, including "Eliot (a long-dead singer of infertility)." And the reports of cannibalism during the Interphase include the account of how "a man called Amis suffered savage amputation of an arm off Kingsway," and "S. R. Coke, journalist, was boiled in an old copper near Shepherd's Bush; Miss Joan Waine a teacher, was fried in segments." In themselves, these allusions and fantasies are delightful, but they combine with occasional flippancies of tone to deprive the book of some of its potential impact. As with Dr. Strangelove, the hilarity of presentation occasionally tends to make it difficult to bear in mind the seriousness of the themes.

Not all of Burgess' novels are in the black comic vein. One of his most entertaining achievements is a splendid historical romance, Nothing like the Sun, which seems to have been at least partially inspired by Stephen Dedalus' discourse on Shakespeare in the ninth chapter of Ulysses. As the title suggests, most of the qualities Burgess attributes to Shakespeare are revealed in the sonnets, where, as Stephen observes, "there is Will in overplus." WS is a man of boundless sexual vitality, only a portion of which can be channeled into his art. (pp. 247-48)

Some readers may find aspects of this novel rather distressing, expecially Burgess' representation of WS himself. Anticipating their distress, Burgess explained in one of his critical works that he chose the title "to emphasize the impossibility of conveying the authentic effulgence." What he sought to present, and I think successfully, is the material both within the poet himself and about him upon which the effulgence could have been so spectacularly shed. If readers are distressed or disappointed by this novel, I suspect that in most cases, it is chiefly because the poet has been presented as a human being.

Like Burgess' WS, the protagonist of Tremor of Intent is a "potent" hero whose spiritual potency is partially betokened by satyriasis and subjection to appetite generally. Superficially, Hillier resembles James Bond, and on one level Tremor of Intent can be viewed as a satiric treatment of the Flemingesque spy novel. The typical Bond feats of appetite are duplicated and surpassed, sometimes to a ridiculous extent. Hillier's eating contest with the super-villain Theodorescu, for example, recalls Bond's gastronomic adventures, but, unlike the typical Bond interval of indulgence, this spectacular meal sends the hero reeling to a rail where he can empty the delicacies into "that traditional vomitorium," the sea.

But Tremor of Intent is much more than a burlesque of the spy novel. It is also a philosophical and theological investigation. Hillier progresses intellectually and spiritually toward a kind of Manichaeism, according to which the greatest sin is refusal to serve God or "Notgod."… [Significantly, Hillier reaches this conclusion] after he has committed himself wholly to the cause of Rome. It would seem that Burgess envisions a kind of dualism that either is or may in time become compatible with Roman Catholic theology. We cannot be entirely sure…. Just how perilous the ground is for the faithful in Tremor of Intent is not clear. The fact that the villains are shown to be evil solely because they serve only themselves certainly does not in itself imply any challenge to Christian orthodoxy. If anything, the implication of the novel as a whole is more in keeping with a Pauline emphasis on the primacy of conscience than an early Augustinian Manichaeism. And it is clear that while Hillier believes that serving the wrong God is better than failing to serve either God, he personally has been led unerringly to the right God by prayer, meditation, and experience.

As a novel, Tremor of Intent is less successful than the others I have mentioned. We are never allowed to forget that Hillier represents the Bond type, and this makes it extremely hard to accept his very rapid spiritual progress. The fact that he is, in sharp contrast to Bond, an intellectual and that he has had a religious upbringing still does not account for his amazing relinquishment of a self that has been subordinate for so long to the exigencies of espionage. It is a marvelously entertaining book, full of Burgess' wit and linguistic dexterity, but it is not, I feel, wholly convincing.

Even the most enthusiastic admirer of Burgess' novels must admit that he has not yet produced a truly great comic novel. But then, of course, truly great comic novels, such as Tom Jones and Ulysses, are not produced very often. This is not to say that Burgess appears to be incapable of producing a work of this stature. On the contrary, he has provided abundant evidence of the requisite gifts of linguistic genius and largeness of mind. One feels that he could produce a truly great novel if he found a subject worthy of an exhaustive exertion of his gifts. Most of the novels he has produced so far appear to be more or less experimental, and, as I have tried to demonstrate, he has experimented quite successfully with a wide variety of genres and styles. We can only hope that his experimenting eventually yields the fruit it promises. He has given us every reason to maintain this hope. (pp. 249-51)