Anthony Burgess: The Manchester Icon Who Had to Leave to Become Himself
AB Fab – On Anthony Burgess
Ian Penman's essay explores Anthony Burgess's lifelong split between his Manchester roots and his adopted European identity. From a bogus Celebrity Mastermind anecdote to his Joyce-haunted fiction, Burgess emerges as a contrarian, tireless stylist whose Catholic outsider sensibility shaped novels like Tremor of Intent and his Joyce primers. Penman confesses he never once laughed at Finnegans Wake, despite Burgess's insistence that it's hilarious on nearly every page.
Burgess depicts Manchester before the Second World War as a Catholic city which is more Irish than English. His sentimental version of Lancashire is a place where the Reformation never really took hold. London and the South of England, by contrast, are snooty, puritanical places.