![]() ![]() “The Doctor Is Sick” and “One Hand Clapping” develop, in fact, into the same large theme-violation and of the brain. He has written about intimate or particular matters such as brain surgery in “The Doctor Is Sick” or a phenomenal quiz show contestant, and these matters have flourished naturally from Burgess's fingers into metaphoric size. He has written about social subjects - population growth in “The Wanting Seed,” modern violence in “A Clockwork Orange"-and chopped them into human particulars. Burgess practices Hardy's most useful conviction that the writer's job is to make the small great and the great small. This is something new in cliffhangers.Ĭombining his brain's confidence with a daredevil faith in luck, Howand parlays the £1,000 into £79,000, a trip with the newly beminked Janet to London, to America, to the Caribbean (“You are enjoying this, aren't you, love? Say you're enjoying it.”), and a return home to Act II of the story, which the reader should view in innocence of its outcome. tentatively declines the answer, and hostesses in fish‐net stockings rush off to seek confirmation of Howard's assurance that Hueffer changed his name to Ford. ![]() There is a lot of scurrying around onstage, and in the fully involved heart of the reader, while the M. who has Ford Madox Ford written down as the correct answer. Wonderfully, Burgess has Howand seem to trip on the all‐or‐nothing £1,000 rung when he gives the name Ford Madox Hueffer to an ignorant M. He wins £1,000 of the fortune on a TV quiz program answering questions about books and writers. The talkative Janet describes gaily and alertly (as if she, like Burgess, were in love with story‐telling) what happens to her and Howard when he applies his photographic memory to making a fortune for them, and succeeds beyond his bitterest dreams. ![]() Here he invests his elegant loquacity in Janet Shirley, the narrator of “One Hand Clapping.” (The novel was first published in England in 1961 under the pseudonym Joseph Kell - all writers should have such books to hide.) Janet is a contented, intelligent British housewife and supermarket Clerk married to Howard, a loving husband whose lack of contentment with his society and whose freakish brain are the mainsprings of the novel. Burgess would seem to have uncontrollable literary energy, which he controls beautifully. His zeal for the act of writing becomes an overt part, though sometimes symbolized, of ‘his art - represented to date by 21 books, two of them on the zealous Joyce, one on the zealous Shakespeare, two others on language and literature, and 14 of them novels, plus numerous articles. Some of the joy Anthony Burgess gives his readers grows from the evident joy he gives his work. ![]()
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