Prime Time Doomsday

LIFE IS A CABARET, death a blast, and apocalypse in Burgess' twenty-sixth novel or "entertainment," as he labels it. Not only is this "very deep" book a "bargain," it will "slip down as easily as a dozen oysters well-sharpened with lemon juice and tobacco," as the author declares in the jacket blurb. The book is really three stories in one. All concern the end of human history adapted for the modern TV viewer. At times The End of the World News is all that its author promises: at times it is merely quirky. But whatever its flaws, this ode to all that is flawed and human and perishable has enough caustic exuberance to rise above them.

A writer fond of doing the unexpected--previous works include A Clockwork Orange, a translation of Oedipus Rex and a sonata--Burgess strives for effect by interweaving the life of Freud, a sci-fi apocalypse, and Trotsky's visit to New York. Styles range from a libretto to a TV-play, at times in utter parody of themselves.

The first of the "three greatest events of our century," Freud's discovery of the unconscious, is presented much like a TV series, a splicing of Masterpiece Theater and The Roadrunner Hour. It features hordes of comic-strip Nazis goose-stepping into the life of the Freud family, the latter annoyingly over-endowed with satiric wit. Freud cuts a shabbily sympathetic figure, indulging his id with streams of forbidden cigars, lisping out lines like. "Is it my fault that I hit on it first? Did, anything prevent you from discovering psychoanalysis?", flaunting a preoccupation with incest, anality, and just about everything else the Viennese bourgeoisie lacked a penchant for.

While Burgess at times lampoons Freud as much as everyone else in the story, he lauds the psychoanalyst's desire to see through the sanitized exterior of his culture to the real nature of man. The slapstick format, occasionally as predictable as the medium it parodies, spares us from excessive psychobabble, presenting instead humanity as it is, not as we would like to perceive it--with the author unmistakably siding with the former.

The second story, vaguely science-fiction, centers around Valentine Brodie, a college professor and dabbling sci-fi writer. In a twist of morbid irony, he finds himself amides scenarios all too typical of, the genre he never took quite seriously: Lynx, a wandering planet from outer space, is going to smash the earth, ending civilization as we know it. But a plan to salvage humanity, by sending the cream of the race into space to begin a new, brings the story back to Burgess' theme--the question of just what is worthwhile about humanity and the culture we have created. According to the plan, Valentine and his kind might be lost--together with Roundy Kupkakes, Kingfisher, Kingfish in Eggbatter, Shakespeare, Milton, and all of the "dirty delightful world" the hero Brodie considers worthwhile. Instead the spaceship would be "full of men and women with thin exact minds who would not know who Sir John Falstaff was." Among them would be Vanessa Brodie, a genius-goddess held to Valentine by a marriage contract, the epitome of "perfection loveable by definition" and definition only.

The third story, a Broadway-style libretto for a musical about Trotsky's visit to New York City in 1917, carries on the same theme. The cast dances its utopian way--"We do the dance now." /"A dance yet"/"Enough of this bourgeois nonsense"/--through the streets of the city in a Pythonesque recreation of Silk Stockings. Politics are essentially ignored, as Comrade Trotsky discovers the meaning of life though--what else--love.

THE TRANSITIONS from story to story make no pretense of being other than jarring, and the slapstick grows redundant at times, whether in self-parody or not. As the stories go on for a combined 400 pages, the devices that serve a half-hour TV show become, at times, painful. In contrast to television, which is fanatically purged of everything outside the common denominator. Burgess is resolutely idiosyncratic.

The End of the World News often reads like a tour of the author's mind conducted by a drunk and disorderly Falstaff. It is an original book, and a witty one, with strengths and faults that are, much like those of its heroes--human.