Novelists From England

"'But what happens when you die?' 'You’re finished with,' Enderby said promptly. 'Done for. And even if you weren’t – well, you die then, gasp your last, then you’re sort of wandering, free of body. You wander around and then you come in contact with a sort of big thing. What is this big thing? God, if you like.'"

"The important thing is to get yourself born. You’re entitled to that. But you’re not entitled to life. Because if you were entitled to life, then the life would have to be quantified. How many years? Seventy? Sixty? Shakespeare was dead at fifty-two. Keats was dead at twenty-six. Thomas Chatterton at seventeen."

"‘The lure of Egypt, gentlemen, and the greater exotic lure of the lands beyond. The East – does not our way lie there? Europe shall, after tomorrow, be wholly ours. We do not wish America or Africa, shapeless savage continents with no future. But ah, the East. India, China, fabulous Japan. And, of course,’ with a fierce savagery replacing the mystic look, ‘we have the mission of striking at the enemy of mankind in that very East where he has so precarious a toehold –’"

"There must always be somebody. However young or insignificant. There has to be somebody who comes from nowhere to say what others are too foolish or too frightened to say."

"And then there were the sick to be transported back to Cairo (where already the holy war might have spread like the bubonic and smiling beards above gelder’s knives be waiting at the gates), and how in the name of filthy castrating Allah did you march men back through the Sinai who couldn’t even sit a mule? He reviewed the sweating patients in gloom, all distorted with bubos…"

"The Turks would do anything with a captured screaming infidel body - make it chew its own penis, thrust the testicles up the anus, saw the noseless earless head off with slow delicacy."

"'Yes yes yes, later. For now I would ask you to proclaim next Friday from the mimbar in the masjid that the French are protectors of the faith and friends of the Prophet.'"

"'As for your circumcisions, the chief modin can arrange all. Your wine must return to the earth, whence the grape came. Haram.'"

"'It was not seemly to raise your flags on the minarets.'"

"'You drink wine, you have foreskins. These things have been observed.'"

"'How can slaves be sent by Allah? You all have hairless faces, the mark of the bondman.'"

"'We believe in Allah, we take the Koran as a sacred book. In our land we broke the power of infidel Rum, in his own land we struck down her Sultan whom men called the Pope, in Malta we slew the Knights, sworn enemies of Islam. Inform your people that we are sent by Allah to geld the evil Turk and raise high the people of the Nile.'"

"'Salam aleikum.'"

"Imams and muftis and kathis sat here on cushions, turbaned elders who had risen above the squalor of the flesh. The heat was tamed by wide-eyed boys with feathery fans. One of the muftis much admired one of these boys, and he stroked his buttocks with a gentle hand. The smell of the holy was wafted towards entering Bonaparte, who said with care:"

"Legrand scratched his cheek with one of Conté's lead pencils and started to Koranize: I say unto you that you have been brought low by kings who lie with houris on the fat sofas of Stamboul and by those that were once among you and came from lands of the sunset, men pale but warlike, to steal your camels and women and snatch the bread from your teeth, in no wise to raise you high among the peoples of the earth. Meanwhile the C-in-C got on with other things - gunpowder factory, street-lighting, Paris-style café, accommodation for laundresses, a balloon demonstration."

"...like a ship, clean and trim on a dirty sea of pox and camel-dung."

"'Like a great big meaty stew,' Gallimard of the 32nd kept saying. In the sauce-coloured Nile blown corpses floated gently seaward, to be fished out with bent bayonets. There were good pickings here, since each Mameluke carried his gold about him. On the shore lay ornate pommels, daggers, pistols, all encrusted with pearl and jewels, worth a fucking fortune....he started to harpoon out a sogged and bloated dreaming Mameluke or Turk or whatever he was. 'Poor bugger's in paradise now, drinking sherbet, poor bugger.'"

"Defiling their shadows, infidels, accursed of Allah, with fingernails that are foot-long daggers, with mouths agape like cauldrons full of teeth on the boil, with eyes all fire, shaitans possessed of Iblis, clanking into their wars all linked, like slaves, with iron chains. Murad Bey, the huge, the single-blowed ox-beheader, saw without too much surprise mild-looking pale men dressed in blue, holding guns, drawn up in squares six deep as though in some massed dance depictive of orchard walls. At the corners of the squares were heavy giins and gunners. There did not seem to be many horsemen. Murad said a prayer within, raised his scimitar to heaven and yelled a fierce and holy word. The word was taken up, many thousandfold, and in a kind of gloved thunder the Mamelukes threw themselves on to the infidel right and nearly broke it. But the squares healed themselves at once, and the cavalry of the faithful crashed in three avenging prongs along the fire-spitting avenues between the walls. A great gun uttered earthquake language at them from within a square, and, rearing and cursing the curses of the archangels of Islam on to the uncircumcized, they wheeled and swung towards their protective village of Embabeh. There they encountered certain of the blue-clad infidel horde on the flat roofs of the houses, coughing musket-fire at them. But then disaster sang along their lines from the rear as shell after shell crunched and the Mamelukes roared in panic and burden to the screams of their terrified mounts, to whose ears these noises were new. Their rear dissolving, their retreat cut off, most sought the only way, that of the river. They plunged in, horseless, seeking to swim across to join the inactive horde of Ibrahim, waiting for .action that could now never come. Murad Bey, with such of his horsemen as were left, yelped off inland to Gizeh."

"They could hardly believe it, the retreating arses of all that Mameluke or Turkish cavalry, heathen anyway, crying heathen words as they cantered off in gunsnioke and dust-clouds, dropping spears and jewels and good Birmingham pistols. And soon it was water water water, a world of blessed water, the muddy stinking welcoming mother Nile near Rahmaniya."

"...The fucking heat and the flies and scorpions and all this fucking sand....These fucking great swarms of black flies had plenty to drink, which was the sweat on our necks and faces. In a way you could see that a man could laugh at the extremes of the misery of it, stumbling through all this white sand like hot snow, the dried shit in our breeches, and knowing we were marching on on on on only to get cut to pieces with fucking axes and scimitars at the end of it....Once or twice we came to villages, but they were all empty or full of dead that the Bedouin had left to the flies and the ants, and the wells had been filled in with stones....and the only sound was the buzzing of those fucking great black flies....and the sun was like a great round arse shitting fire."

"The disembarkation was a fucking shambles and we only took Alexandria as quick as we did to get a fucking drink somewhere, because we were near dead with the thirst....The town was full of a lot of half-starved blacks, near-blacks you could call them, in filthy rags, raising their hands to the bloody burning heavens when they saw us come in, shouting Allah Allah and so on. Some old bints with veils on gave us fucking filthy water to drink, but filthy or not it was like elation and ecstasy and so on. There was hardly a solitary fucking thing worth having in the whole town, all half-starved goats and so on, and talk about the fucking heat and the smell. Anyway, what they called sheiks came and gave him the keys, and the officers did all right with like knives and scimitars with jewels on, but then we had to move on to Damanhur and Rahmaniya and so on, near dropping with the fucking heat...."

"In the name of Allah the all-powerful, all-merciful, all-knowing, know that it is by his holy will that we come to free the peoples of the Nile from their immemorial and most cruel bondage to the Turks and the Mamelukes, free men of Frankistan bringing freedom, respecting Islam and the tenets of the holy prophet, may his name be praised and the holy name of Allah most high exalted for ever more."

"The scientific approach to life is not necessarily appropriate to states of visceral anguish."

"…enjoyed Dravidian transports."

"…satyromaniacal…"

"‘…you read mostly menus and the moles on whores’ bellies….’"

"‘…Women I do not much care for myself - I prefer little Greek shepherd-boys…’"

"…British louts with guitars and emetic little songs…infantile screamers…"

"…the cold deflation of crapula…"

"‘This damnable sex, boys - ah, you do well to writhe in your beds at the very mention of the word. All the evil of our modern times springs from unholy lust, the act of the dog and the bitch on the bouncing bed, limbs going like traction engines, the divine gift of articulate speech diminished to squeals and groans and pantings. It is terrible, terrible, an abomination before God and His Holy Mother. Lust is the fount of all other of the deadly sins, leading to pride of the flesh, covetousness of the flesh, anger in the thwarting of desire, gluttony to feed the spent body to be at it again, envy of the sexual prowess and sexual success of others, sloth to admit enervating day-dreams of lust. Only in the married state, by God’s holy grace, is it sanctified, for then it becomes the means of begetting fresh souls for the peopling of the Kingdom of Heaven.’"

"…my two chronic diseases of gluttony and satyriasis…"

"The West is eveningland, the East morningland."

"One day I was sitting one side of the fireplace, and my wife was sitting on the other, and I suddenly said to her, “Wouldn’t it be a good idea to write a story about some boys on an island, showing how they would really behave, being boys and not little saints as they usually are in children’s books.” And she said, “That’s a first-class idea! You write it!” So I went ahead and wrote it."

"The theme is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable. The whole book is symbolic in nature except the rescue in the end where adult life appears, dignified and capable, but in reality enmeshed in the same evil as the symbolic life of the children on the island. The officer, having interrupted a man-hunt, prepares to take the children off the island in a cruiser which will presently be hunting its enemy in the same implacable way. And who will rescue the adult and his cruiser?"

"Basically I'm an optimist. Intellectually I can see man's balance is about fifty-fifty, and his chances of blowing himself up are about one to one. I can't see this any way but intellectually. I'm just emotionally unable to believe that he will do this. This means that I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist, I suppose."

"The man who tells the tale if he has a tale worth telling will know exactly what he is about and this business of the artist as a sort of starry-eyed inspired creature, dancing along, with his feet two or three feet above the surface of the earth, not really knowing what sort of prints he's leaving behind him, is nothing like the truth."

"The Herr Doctor does not know about peoples."

"[T]he parody is so much better than anything that W. Somerset Maugham ever wrote himself."

"[H]ighly ambitious work...continuing power....vast novel...told over eighty-one chapters by an eighty-one-year-old pederast Catholic writer-narrator...summed up the literary, social and moral history of the century with comic richness as well as encyclopedic knowingness."

"Franky, it's a fucking farrago."

"[T]he post-Joycean artist as lecher-poet, obsessed with death, language and his own insides."

"One cannot condemn a novel of 150 pages for failing to answer some of the most difficult and puzzling questions of human existence, but one can praise it for raising them in a peculiarly profound manner and forcing us to think about them."

"...can be read as an ‘answer’ to…Mailer’s The White Negro (1957) and other works of that period recommending crime and ... murder as expressions of existential freedom. ...Mailer recommended that whites emulate ... traits that ... were producing ... the black 'underclass'. In A Clockwork Orange, the young thugs are scarcely existential heroes. The surrounding society does not provide the norms which, internalized, allow for civilization. In the underclass foreseen in A Clockwork Orange, Mr Mailer’s sentimental dream has become our own nightmare."

"He has never done better than in his opening trilogy about Malaya..."

"[D]elightful, comic, linguistically playful...an opening step in the extraordinarily rich, inventive and experimental career that was to come."

"Anthony Burgess had an ego as big as Hyde Park."

"Nearly 40 years ago, on the ferry from Liverpool to Dublin, I hurled one of Burgess's Enderby novels into the Irish Sea, unable to bear another word. I have thought of him ever since as a pretentious windbag, a buttonholing bore whose writing had energy but no vitality."

"Anthony Burgess’s gusto and exuberance springs from his brilliant bum."

"What...remains of Burgess's colossal output? The canon...is limited....at its heart, we find just a handful of books: the Malayan Trilogy, the Enderby novels, A Clockwork Orange, and Earthly Powers. These are lasting and significant. The career, on the other hand, is not inspiring, poisoned by paranoia, bombast and an accumulation of lies so corrosive that the...life...comes down as something rusty and sadly disposable."

"Burgess's tarty charlatanry was central to his genius."