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Tremor Of Intent. Anthony Burgess (1966)

by Anthony Burgess(Favorite Author)

3.69 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

1846689201 (ISBN13: 9781846689208)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Serpent's Tail

review 1: Burgess indulges himself in word play, and he is at once allusive, elliptical, and pontifical—dropping names and concepts, eliding stretches of action or thought too banal too discuss, and lecturing lyrically about higher things. It's a wise and witty performance, but at the same time it's steeped in pastiche, which makes the novel irresolute as a send-up of the spy novel (a la James Bond or Le Carre) or as an investigation of loftier things (a la Graham Greene). And maybe that's all it's supposed to be: a sugary, quivering gelatinous confection, delightful to consume, but too rich to ever serve as the main course.
review 2: Burgess does the spy thriller. Sounds promising but I'm not sure it works. At one and the same time, as you'd expect, Burgess aims to ... morebe faithful to the genre while subverting it. But this just give a flimsy, rather silly narrative to a typical Burgess meditation on catholicism. On top of that, this has dated badly. Were the sexualised pre-pubescents, for example, as shocking in the mid sixties as they are now? If not, perhaps that explains a lot of the cases that are currently in the newspapers. less

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