Anthony Burgess & Malcolm Bradbury

Anthony Burgess & Malcolm Bradbury as Novelists

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) gained recognition as a novelist when his first three novels— Time for a Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket, and Beds in the East—were collectively published as The Malayan Trilogy in 1972. These works were directly inspired by his experiences as an educational officer in colonial Malay. Another important work, The Long Day Wanes (1982), later adapted into a film, shows Burgess’s gift for verbal inventiveness and satire, though its overall tone is bleak. After returning to England and being diagnosed with a brain tumour, Burgess wrote several novels in quick succession, including The Doctor is Sick (1960), One Hand Clapping (1961), The Worm and the Ring (1961), and The Wanting Seed (1962). His famous dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange (1962) presents a violent protagonist whose conditioning is based on behaviourist psychology. Its most remarkable feature is its use of an invented teenage slang called Nadsat, derived from Russian and English colloquialisms.

Malcolm Bradbury (1932–2000) was known for his picaresque and farcical novels such as Eating People is Wrong (1959) and Stepping Westward (1965), both linked to academic life in the tradition of Amis’s Lucky Jim. His novel The History of Man depicts the central character Howard Kirk, a sociologist and author of The Defeat of Privacy, with what Michael Alexander calls “comic-horrific originality.” Kirk strongly believes in Marxism and rejects the idea of a personal self. In Rates of Exchange (1982), Bradbury continues exploring academic culture of the 1960s, mixing seriousness with whimsical humour. This novel foreshadows the lighter, more entertaining tone of his later works like Cuts (1987) and Dr Criminale (1992).