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.
--
Robert McCrum in the London Observer newspaper, November 6 2005Anthony Burgess
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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
Nothing Like the Sun and the Enderby books prove that Burgess is as clever as he seems. His utopian satires, of which 1985 is yet another, mainly just seem clever. At a generous estimate there are half a dozen ideas in each of them.
Clive James
Nothing like the sun and the Enderby books prove that Burgess is as clever as he seems. His utopian satires, of which 1985 is yet another, mainly just seem clever. At a generous estimate there are half a dozen ideas in each of them.
Anthony Burgess
Why Baroque? Because it is set in the Baroque, and it IS baroque. Why Cycle? Because I am trying to avoid the T-word ("trilogy"). In my mind this work is something like 7 or 8 connected novels. These have been lumped together into three volumes because it is more convenient from a publishing standpoint, but they could just as well have been put all together in a single immense volume or separated into 7 or 8 separate volumes. So to slap the word "trilogy" on it would be to saddle it with a designation that is essentially bogus. Having said that, I know everyone's going to call it a trilogy anyway.
Neal Stephenson
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: — Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.Percy Bysshe Shelley
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