The prolific and apparently inexhaustible Anthony Burgess writes like one of those glib and often fascinating Englishmen who are able to talk for hours at no risk of repeating themselves. When he is at the top of his form, as in Enderby, there are few writers who can touch him; when he is off, as in Nothing Like the Sun, he is a crashing bore; and, either on or off, he gives the impression of skating on perilously thin ice over a bottomless lake of utter balderdash, but he almost never falls in. He is not so much intoxicated with words as he is entranced with the phenomena of language, inflection, and his own considerable erudition. Narcissistic though this intoxication may be, it is also communicable through the medium of his prose. Burgess gives good value….

In an informative foreword [to The Eve of Saint Venus] that effectively spikes the guns of any critic who might either take him too seriously or miss some of his finer points, he describes it as a "commedia dell' Aldwych," after the old Aldwych Theatre in London. Breathes there a man with soul so dead who is not lovingly familiar with this hallowed type of British drama, as stylized as the Noh plays and American cowboy movies? Utterly good-hearted and as mechanical and amusing as a clever wind-up toy, the Aldwych drawing-room farces generally took place in the great country houses of a rural aristocracy which Burgess describes, perhaps too harshly, as "silly, ingrown, [and] mainly non-existent." Within this admittedly contrived dramatic frame, Burgess confines a number of characters, most of them stock….

In keeping with the dramatic form of the novel, the characters do not speak but declaim, improbably and at length, in what Burgess intends as a parody of the self-conscious "literary" plays of Christopher Fry, T. S. Eliot and their imitators. Suffice it to say that he gets away with it….

All of this is great fun and what used to be called a good read. It is not a major novel, does not pretend to be, and can be got through in a single evening. It is less about "the importance of physical love," as Burgess claims, than it is—in both structure and content—about England. It is an England that perhaps never existed but came close to reality, at least in the mind and heart. It was present in those old Aldwych farces—a basic decency, a humane optimism beneath all the silly goings-on, the entrances and exits and multiple deceptions that were, really, all in fun…. The whole atmosphere of the book reminds one of that long summer's afternoon in Essex before the Great War that H. G. Wells evoked so movingly in Mr. Britling Sees It Through—so movingly that one cannot help believe it. Burgess ostensibly set out to write a kind of jape in the manner of Thorne Smith; he has instead delivered a kind of eulogy on a culture.

If the book has a fault, it is one of haste. Burgess skims material that deserves rather more exploration than it gets, and his action is all jammed together a bit breathlessly. Haste, of course, is an occupational hazard of the theatrical form, along with a fluency that occasionally lapses into mere patter, but one wishes that Burgess had made his haste more slowly. He is not only dealing in games and parody but in real ideas and actual myths, and he is too good at them to be allowed to get off with a brief skimming. One is left with the impression that the chosen vessel is too small for the wine, and that we have not had enough time to finish our talk.