To mark the 30th publication anniversary of Byrne, we revisit Burgess’s posthumous novel.

When Anthony Burgess died in November 1993, he had completed the typescript of his last work, a 150-page narrative poem titled Byrne: A Novel. Rumours of this novel began to circulate in the British press a few days after Burgess’s death was announced. The Times published a piece in its diary column, teasing readers with the information that at least one full-length work would appear posthumously.

The book was eventually published by Hutchinson in September 1995 — but Byrne is often left out of discussions of Burgess’s work, and there has not been much in the way of critical commentary apart from reviews of the first edition, most of which were expressions of bafflement or incomprehension.

Byrne is a strange and wonderful book — a verse narrative in five parts, written in imitation of Lord Byron, and employing (mostly) the same stanza-form that Byron had used in his epic poem Don Juan (eight iambic pentameter lines with an ABABABCC rhyme scheme). A note by Liana Burgess, Anthony’s second wife, found in the Burgess Foundation’s archive, tells us that Burgess had re-read Byron’s Don Juan during the four years when he was working on Byrne.

The plot, which takes in a great deal of history and politics, is difficult to summarize: Michael Byrne, an Anglo-Irish musician and composer, born in 1899, travels the world in the first half of the twentieth century, having affairs with women and producing countless children. After an extended visit to Nazi Germany, where he writes operas and film scores, also setting passages from Mein Kampf to music, he disappears. There are reports of his post-war activities in Brunei, Japan and Kenya — but nobody is sure whether he is alive or dead.

In the second section, Byrne’s twin sons Timothy and Thomas (Tim and Tom) team up with their sister Dorothy and another brother called Brian, with a plan to track down their father and make him face up to his crimes. There is a sub-plot involving an international gang of terrorists who are trying to ban Dante’s Divine Comedy, on the grounds that the Italian poet has placed the founder of Islam in the eighth circle of his fictional Inferno. At a European culture conference in Strasbourg, a statue of Dante is used to conceal a massive bomb. The survivors take themselves to London to confront the ancient Byrne, now a hundred years old, who is thought to be responsible for the chaos. Civilisation is collapsing, the polar ice-caps are melting, and the world is over-heating. This, too, is probably the fault of Michael Byrne.

The plot is intended to be melodramatic, but it seems to be less important than the novel’s style. The story is told in Byronic ottava rima, and, throughout the text, Burgess delights in finding unexpected rhymes:

Reader, they married. After such collective
Villainy, what was bigamy to Byrne?
She did not trust him, but she scorned detective
Devices to dig up, unturn and learn
The secrets of a soul perhaps defective
In Swiss morality. Still, Byrne would earn
His keep by, as the Swiss expression said,
Plying the fifth of five bare legs in bed.

The starting-point for Burgess’s novel was a contemporary event. On 14 February 1989, Radio Tehran announced a fatwa or death sentence against Salman Rushdie. This had been declared by Ayatollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, following the publication of Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses. Burgess was very active in defending Rushdie against the threat to his life: he denounced Khomeini on BBC Radio 4, and wrote articles against the fatwa for a number of British and Irish newspapers. He also wrote a long poem about the Rushdie case, ‘An Essay on Censorship’, published for the first time in Jonathan Mann’s edition of Burgess’s Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2020).

Another influence was Vladimir Nabokov’s eccentric novel Pale Fire, which takes the form of a poem in four cantos plus extensive critical commentary. Burgess reviewed Pale Fire for the Yorkshire Post when it first appeared in 1962, and he included Nabokov’s novel in Ninety-Nine Novels, his personal selection of the best novels in English published between 1939 and 1983. Like Pale Fire, Byrne includes a discussion of the afterlife: one of Burgess’s characters reports a near-death experience in which the next world (either heaven or hell) is briefly glimpsed.

In the final chapter of Byrne, there is an unexpected moment of affirmation. It is Christmas Eve, and Father Timothy, who has resolved the religious doubts which have been gnawing at him throughout the novel, is going off to say Mass. His brother Tom, recently diagnosed with a terminal illness, faces an uncertain future:

Let the logician and the Godman show
The foolishness, but let the word be spoken.
Tim embraced Tom, embarking for Heathrow.
Smiling, Christmas-elated, somewhat sad too,
Blessing the filthy world. Somebody had to.

Burgess’s last novel is crammed full of bawdiness, horror, mayhem and laughter. In common with his other published work, the book presents a tragi-comic view of life in which the main characters are compromised and flawed but fundamentally decent. Evil seems to exist as an active force in the world, but it can be overcome if people will work together and refuse to surrender.

Byrne is not Burgess’s easiest novel, but it contains his final statement about art, creativity and the plight of humankind in a universe which may (or may not) be godless. At the end of the book, as the author also approaches the end of his life, it is suggested that we might find salvation in complex works of art and literature. In this final novel, Burgess sums up what he came to say very concisely: ‘Let the word be spoken.’

Byrne is published in paperback by Vintage and available from Bookshop.org

• Share | 
• Print