John Banville at The New Statesman:
A novelist’s name is writ in water, and come a drought may be reduced to a wisp of spume. In his day Anthony Burgess was a very big fish in the literary pond, most famous, or infamous, for the 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange, written in a wonderfully clever Russo-English patois of the author’s invention. The book was adapted for the screen by Stanley Kubrick, who later suppressed the film because of its perceived infatuation with or even encouragement to extreme violence.
A Clockwork Orange was not Burgess’s best work, though it was the one that made his reputation beyond the world of books and bookmen. He was extraordinarily productive. He wrote more than 30 novels, along with short stories, poetry, children’s books, two volumes of autobiography, lives of Shakespeare, Hemingway and DH Lawrence, books on linguistics, on music, two studies of Joyce, translations, scores of introductions to the work of others, and countless reviews, a selection of which were published in book form under the apt title Urgent Copy.
more here.
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