The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Byrne: A Novel by Anthony BurgessJack Byrne
Anthony Burgess. Byrne: A Novel. Carroll & Graf, 1997. 150 pp. $20.00.
Shades of Alexander Pope and George Gordon Lord Byron, a novel in verse! This is no ordinary novel (but then neither was A Clockwork Orange). From the first stanza to the last, we are in the shadows of The Rape of the Lock and Don Juan. Burgess has taken, in this mock-heroic modern tale of sexual high jinks, the classical ottava and turned it on its head. When the narrator writes of Byrne’s sexual prowess, “As for Cash / He lived on women, paying in about / Ten inches. We don’t know what they paid out,” an immediate echo comes from Byron: “A little still she strove, and much repented, / And whispering ‘I will ne’er consent’—consented.” Or when Tim, one of Byrne’s twins (the other is Tom) meets Dorothy, his half-sister, she is described as having “A slack / Sack bosom, ample though, from which depended / Smeared spectacles whose legs had been ill-mended,” we might look for the antithesis in Pope’s magnificent couplet about Belinda: “On her white Breast a sparkling Cross she wore, / Which Jews might kiss and Infidels adore.” And though Byrne tells a story about an Irish composer and painter and four of his children, Byrne is much, much more than a tour de force mock-epic novel about an Irish Wilt Chamberlain. Burgess, in fact, uses the ottava rime to express his feelings about music, art, film, TV, theology, philosophy, history, and literature. He does this by giving us witty and ironic comments on important topics of our time. Byrne is Burgess at his best. [Jack Byrne]