The metaphor of the clockwork universe provides a useful touchstone for considering [some of Burgess's novels] …, and it is a motif extended and developed throughout his work; but Burgess has already beaten clock time as he has transcended national borders through fiction which constantly breaks beyond imposed and conventional thinking. (p. 3)

Burgess doesn't "think that the job of literature is to teach us how to behave," but he does "think it can make clearer the whole business of moral choice by showing what the nature of life's problems is." In other words, he must first define the clockwork enemy; once we see the situation clearly, then perhaps it can be controlled. For Burgess personally and artistically this definition begins with the global holocaust of World War II, which redefined racial, political, individual, spiritual, and temporal values for the modern world. (p. 4)

[A Vision of Battlements] not only examines World War II milieu, but also attempts to draw the battle lines in a new war, a fight for individual identity after the collective nightmare of a world where ordinary politics, art and love are unknown and can be either friend or foe….

Battlements is a rich literary orchestration of serious personal themes set forth in a style which is musically and metrically informed. The fact that it depicts [the hero] Ennis as a struggling composer, haunted by melodies, yet unable to fully realize his conceptions ("Concepcion" is his lover), makes this book a fascinating starting point for becoming acquainted with Burgess and some of his recurring themes and rhythms. (p. 5)

The names and personalities and events [in Battlements] have more to do with Virgil's Aeneid than with remembered actuality…. Burgess deepens the fiction by moving continually along three planes—the personal, the historical, and the mythical—and though three types of temporal dimension are utilized, it is interesting to note that they linger on the past and present, with the future uncertain and indecipherable. Many mythological types appear and develop in his fiction, figures which suggest enduring ancient principles, and some of the characters Burgess invents in this book appear mythically in other writing…. Like the Roman poet Virgil in the Aeneid, Burgess is fully conscious of writing in the shadow of a towering classical tradition. He patterns his hero after Aeneas, with full awareness that his great predecessor James Joyce had already worked greater wonders with the Greek classical epic in his new Ulysses. Aeneas is patently a less original hero than Ulysses or Achilles, a secondary type of epic figure molded and weighed down by literary predecessors, almost as though the character himself were dimly conscious of the chaotic and degraded state of affairs in the present. (pp. 5-6)

Rome (like England in Burgess's day) had started to lose faith when Virgil wrote, and his superhero Aeneas does not ultimately succeed through an overstated heroism in recreating the essential fabric of classical conviction which was then unravelling. Aeneas lacks the cleverness of Odysseus, and the driving, purposeful rage of Achilles; he goes through the motions of epic hero for seven years in Virgil's attempt to connect the great Greek past to the shaky Roman present, and thereby prepare a greater future. Yet Aeneas dies short of his goal to found Rome…. Ennis, too, stops short of his goal; he fails to establish a new life on Gibraltar and finally is shown trying to return to his old home, which no longer really exists. He has no son to complete his failed quest. His name and his actions suggest ends rather than beginnings; and as his name implies, Ennis is in us all. (p. 6)

[The prologue to Battlements is masterful,] introducing the haunting themes of love, time, and isolation, which are more fully developed throughout the rest of the book and in Burgess's later novels as well. Time is shown through a confusing clockwork, its rhythms constantly repeating themselves like the recurring ideas and motifs of a musical composition; repeated mythological references link the present to the past, and both in turn point toward the future (also a factor in the Aeneid). (p. 9)

The fictive and narrative structure which Burgess utilizes in the novel is, in effect, a verbal elaboration of the Passacaglia. The echoing motifs from the Aeneid imply a kinship in theme and variations, all played against the recurring bass line of history and of myth. The fact that the Passacaglia is first performed at the wedding of Ennis's lover (the woman who bears his child) to another man adds a considerable ironic and grotesquely comic angle. Burgess always verges on comedy, though the atmosphere rarely becomes light enough for outright laughter. It is laughter held in check by the pressure of circumstances too dangerous for comedy.

Battlements plays out a chain of repeated thematic motifs, including the inability fully to love, or to understand what love means, the inability to compose or conceive (figuratively or literally) without this basic emotion, the overwhelming pressure of time as it determines and influences behavior, the alternative memory of time as it becomes history or myth, and finally, the fact which throws all of these thematic problems into sharpest focus, the ultimate end of time in personal terms—death. Death haunts the edges of this novel—as it does all of Burgess's fiction. It is the certain confrontation that will put an end to all of our excuses about love, and cause us finally to know both eros and thanatos; it is the final measure of definition leading to history, myth, or oblivion. (p. 10)

Ennis, like Burgess, is a "lapsed Catholic," and the shadow of Original Sin, like the shadow of God (which is never clear, and is often mistaken for the shadow of authority [particularly in the Army] or the shadow of death) casts shades of meaning across the book's action. (p. 11)

The novel is a panorama of great conflicts unresolved, the yearning to be creative, to be free, to be loving, all of these aborted and destroyed. Authority seems invested and bestowed without reason. Surely the wrong god is in control. (p. 15)

The final heroic achievement in the book is [its] ability to glimpse a vision of the past as "ridiculous or lovable." It is a detachment born of great pain, but a vision which at least still holds some hope for human feeling and for love. It also allows in its own dwindling measure the absolute end to a charge of hubris; and puts into perspective the petty battlements Ennis has been forced to command…. [In] all this, Ennis, like many a Burgess hero, is a detached observer who finds himself in circumstances beyond his control, particularly at the mercy of societal bureaucracies. Around him and through him we see the certain deterioration of the British empire, combined with the demand of its subject peoples for freedom and independence.

The spirit of revolution is even more evident in Burgess's Malayan trilogy….

The title used for the American publications of these three novels [The Long Day Wanes] serves very well to suggest their temporal concern. We are present at the waning of a "day" which has been artificially long. England's rule over her extensive foreign territories seems both undemocratic and fortuitous, and Burgess reflects seriously on the theme of paternalism in national, educational, and technological affairs. (p. 16)

The first novel in the trilogy [Time for a Tiger] has a wild and woolly sound about it, as if it were going to be a jungle adventure story. But like the civilized veneer the British occupation has imposed atop the native culture, "tiger" has been reduced from its savage jungle danger to the brand name of a beer. The tale is set off by Blake's "Tiger, tiger burning bright / in the forests of the night," and the Manichean "fearful symmetry" which seems so much a part of the Burgess world view. This frightening balance is suggested in the opening inscription from Arthur Hugh Clough: "Allah is great, no doubt, and Juxtaposition his prophet." (pp. 16-17)

Juxtaposition is a technique used frequently throughout the trilogy, and particularly in the first novel. An element typical of comedy, in which the contrast between high and low extremes provokes laughter, this contrast in tension is skillfully maintained to achieve an effect which has been called by some critics "Black Comedy," but which may actually be closer to a slightly detached existential or Kierkegaardian Weltschmerz … or Angst. (p. 17)

The mythic dimension transposes historic time into another realm, and by developing the relationship between history and myth, and showing how one may be perceived as another, Burgess directs his readers to undertake the metamorphosis.

Battlements presented a hero (Ennis) who was struggling to understand his identity through a similar process: "But Ennis pushed his wife back beyond history, to myth. It was the best thing to do; it would ensure a kind of fidelity." In the trilogy Burgess exposes myths about the British way of Empire, as set against the more primitive Malay traditions, including tribal religions and even voodoo. This classic juxtaposition of old and new, East and West, is dropped against a far more complicated and mixed atmosphere than the racial stand-off in Gibraltar…. (pp. 18-19)

The racial mixture is complemented stylistically through the broad vocabulary Burgess employs. Linguistic confusions, multilingual puns, and an obvious delight in the pure sounds and textures of words play significant roles in his fiction. (p. 19)

The first book of the Malayan trilogy is resolved by the pure operation of chance. Whatever the partial breakthrough seemed to signify for [the protagonist] Crabbe, it certainly did not establish his ability to choose and to act decisively in present time. At the end, the characters move into a future which more closely resembles the random spinning of the roulette wheel than [a] clockwork mechanism…. Even the mechanics of the fictional technique seem consciously clumsy at the end. Burgess has employed a Deus ex Machina for deliverance as the long days of empire wane, a slim chance only for the individual characters who find themselves inheritors of the present situation. (pp. 20-1)

At the end of Tiger, Crabbe finds he has been "done in" by "an enemy in the blanket," one of the very students he might have counted on for support. The phrase—with overtones of internal conflict and betrayal, and even the suggestion of a connection between the hotbed of Malaya and the problem-ridden marriage bed Crabbe shares with Fenella—carries over as the title of the second book in the trilogy. The Enemy in the Blanket follows Crabbe even deeper into the East, into the political, cultural, and philosophical turmoil of the heated environment. (p. 21)

There is an accurate and nearly mythic sense to the clarity of vision … [Crabbe attains] at the end of the novel…. [In retelling a] final story to the Malays from his veranda, Crabbe himself becomes myth, the past transformed into eternity: "The story of the man from the far country who tried to help…." There is a union in this mythic realm, an integration of past, present, and future time, a transcendence of a kind. But it is, the reader knows, an exaggerated, highly ironic fiction.

As the Malayan trilogy moves toward its culmination, we are being asked to ponder a major historical and cultural event. The paradigm for Battlements was Virgil's epic and the founding of the Roman empire. That classical precedent lurks behind the Malayan scenario as well, but the more essential historical paradigm in this case is Shakespeare's drama and the British empire…. [The] allusion behind the title of the final book in the trilogy [Beds in the East] is taken … from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, a work which presents themes of Empire (Roman and British), the meeting of East and West, the closeness of love and of death, the conflicting interests of State and the individual. In Shakespeare's great play, the title phrase of Burgess's book occurs as Mark Antony is expressing his thanks to Caesar for calling him away from the East. Antony explains, "The beds i' the east are soft; and thanks to you / That call'd me, timelier than my purposes, hither; For I have gain'd by it." Crabbe's actions take on added significance when considered against Antony's, for in many ways they are opposite. Crabbe does not allow himself to be called back, and his death is not so much suicide as destiny; allusions enrich Burgess's novels through literary counterpoint. (pp. 26-7)

The trilogy is one of the great works of English twentieth century literature, full of warmth, humor, literacy, charm, and characters with stature and distinction. It exorcises many of the naive idealistic preachments of Ennis in Battlements and puts them to the test of struggle. In the end Victor's death fulfills the recognition he himself achieved: "The past has got to be killed." Burgess's first novels seem to have served something of the same purpose in his own life. They were a way of facing up to the present, to racial conflict with no easy solution, to indifference, sterility, a lack of heroism; a way for the idealist to assimilate the Waste Land by battling it out in the jungle. (p. 33)

Burgess has mastered a broad comic style in [The Doctor is Sick], with more intellectual and slapstick humor than in the earlier works. To be sure, the bleak and serious edge is there, but a greater playfulness with language, more room for outrageous and absurdly exaggerated elements (which can occur freely in the patient's hallucinating state), and a happier use of irony throughout the book make this novel more completely comic. (p. 35)

Perhaps his best known book, both on its own merits and from the Stanley Kubrick film, [A Clockwork Orange] was a radical experiment for Burgess, and a marked departure from his previous fictional techniques. Having shown himself capable of brilliantly constructed traditional novels, Burgess turned to new novelistic sub-genres for variety, hoping at the same time to reach a wider audience. (p. 36)

Clockwork Orange is a masterpiece as both a novel and a film, but the linguistic richness of the book is unsurpassed. The theme is a simple one, yet like most simple but profound themes it has such complexity that it cannot be unequivocally stated. Essentially, Burgess has written another variation on his Manichean dialectic, but the key issue here is freedom of choice. The book suggests that both sides of the dialectic must be allowed to survive, for without them there would be no real choice, and the world would be based on tyranny rather than freedom. (p. 37)

A Clockwork Orange forces us to examine politics, media, and morality, and to ask what kind of fruit we have grown from "the world-tree in the world-orchard that like Bog or God planted." The action is not so far from the arbitrary violence currently occurring in the large cities of the world. In fact, this is a kind of disorder which has always been with us….

The clockwork orange state is a rotten mechanical fruit, but on Alex, a ghost who will not be put to rest, Burgess pins the hope that this disturbed spirit may somewhere awaken our sleeping moral sensibilities, that someone will step forth truly to set the time to right.

It is not unreasonable to expect to find strong stylistic, thematic, and generic links between novels written in close proximity, and this is certainly the case with the trio of futuristic fictions Burgess produced in rapid short order. Though published first, Clockwork Orange was the last of these in order of composition. It was written in the first half of 1961, while The Wanting Seed was completed between August and October in 1960, and One Hand Clapping in November and December, 1960. Taken together, the three form a counterpart of the Malayan trilogy which we might call a dystopian trilogy, though Burgess has never indicated they should be read together or in any particular sequence. Seed and Orange are most closely related, both having futuristic settings, while Hand brings the problems more specifically home to contemporary England.

Seed contains the kernel of Orange, as the organic metaphor suggests. It is concerned with the germ, the problem of conception—a familiar problem in Burgess's work from the time he named his first heroine Concepcion. (p. 43)

More hopeful than Clockwork Orange, Seed suggests there is a chance for survival, and even for a positive answer to [Beatrice-Joanna's] prayer "Sea … teach us all sense." Tristram the teacher at the end of the book has walked through death and back to life, with knowledge and vision enriched. Burgess successfully walked the same road through this shadow of death, completing his five novels, and miraculously surviving the death sentence his doctors had pronounced. His teaching and his sense seem to have come clearer for it, and both of these have been sharpened by an awareness of time.

The zen title of this comic and materialistic novel [One Hand Clapping] is only one irony of many in its deceptively simple framework. It promises a philosophical perspective with an Eastern flavor, but merely delivers a miasma of Western materialism and violence. It does truthfully refer, however, to a lack of thesis-antithesis. In fact, the attempt to resist the single-moded value system is as vain a pursuit … as one hand clapping. Who is the enemy, where is the enemy? There is nothing to come up against in this novel … except oblivion. (pp. 50-1)

It is another masterpiece of first person narrative, limited in this case to the mundane and trivial vocabulary of an uneducated woman [Janet] who understands little of what she sees. It succeeds masterfully not only in evoking the emptiness of life in the welfare state, but in conveying the appalling consequences of vacuity. Janet's narrative is a mirror in words of her husband's problem, which in turn mirrors a larger societal problem. (p. 51)

In these books Burgess has fully explored the social-political-temporal parameters of a clockwork universe. Particularly in these central novels, blended of science fiction, fantasy, and social satire, he has created eloquent philosophical moral studies and taken his writings to the limits of time and the universals. (p. 60)

Richard Mathews, in his The Clockwork Universe of Anthony Burgess (copyright © 1978 by Richard Mathews), The Borgo Press, 1978, 63 p.