In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. The list is typically idiosyncratic, and shows the breadth of Burgess’s interest in fiction. This podcast, by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, explores the novels on Burgess’s list with the help of writers, critics and other special guests.

In this episode, Andrew Biswell explores the strange dystopia of The Old Men at the Zoo by Angus Wilson, with writer and academic Marina MacKay.

The Old Men at the Zoo is a novel of two halves. In the first, Simon Carter, secretary of London Zoo, is tempted by responsibility and power and forgoe his gifts as a naturalist. Yet, in their desire to set up a reserve for wild animals, the old men at the zoo are blind to the approaching chaos of nuclear war. In the second half, the zoo is taken over by a dystopian dictatorship and transformed into a concentration camp.

Angus Wilson was born in 1913. During the Second World War he worked as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park, after which he worked as a librarian in the British Museum’s Department of Printed Books. His first novel, Hemlock and After, was published in 1952 and was followed by seven more, including Late Call, which also appears on Anthony Burgess’s list. From 1966-1978 he was Professor of English at the University of East Anglia, where he co-founded, with Malcolm Bradbury, the famous Masters in Creative Writing. He was knighted in 1980 and died in 1991.

Marina MacKay is Professor of English Literature and a Fellow of St Peter’s College, University of Oxford. Her books include Modernism, War, and Violence (Bloomsbury, 2017) and Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime Critic (OUP, 2018). She is currently writing a book about British literature and culture in the 1950s.

Books mentioned in this episode

By Angus Wilson (available as eBooks):

• Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956)
• The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (1958)
• Late Call (1964)
• Diversity and Depth in Fiction: Selected Critical Writings (1983)

By others:

• Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (1818)
• Bleak House by Charles Dickens (1853)
• Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens (1865)
• Strangers and Brothers by C.P. Snow (1940-70)
• The Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot (1941)
• Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (1945)
• A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell (1951-75)
• The Novel Now by Anthony Burgess (1967)
• Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
• The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas (1981)
• The Fourth Protocol by Frederick Forsyth (1984)

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In previous series of Ninety-Nine Novels, we learnt about authors including James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, Nadine Gordimer, Vladimir Nabokov and Christopher Isherwood, among others. These episodes are available at your favourite place to get podcasts.

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The theme music for the Ninety-Nine Novels podcast is Anthony Burgess’s Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor, performed by No Dice Collective.

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