Publication
W. W. Norton & Company (2013), Edition: Reissue, 272 pages
Original publication date
1966
Collections
Genres
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Description
From the author of A Clockwork Orange, a brilliantly funny spy novel.
User reviews
LibraryThing member dandelionroots
Set during the Cold War, an English spy recounts his beginnings and his "final" assignment. I love his phrases, but not the novel. Perhaps I'm just not a fan of the spy genre in general.
LibraryThing member dbsovereign
A slick satire disguised as a spy novel, this is one of my favorite Burgess books. Who, other than Burgess, could have come up with the following: "This damnable sex, boys — ah, you do well to writhe in your beds at the very mention of the word. All the evil of our modern times springs from
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unholy lust, the act of the dog and the bitch on the bouncing bed, limbs going like traction engines, the divine gift of articulate speech diminished to squeals and groans and pantings. It is terrible, terrible, an abomination before God and His Holy Mother. Lust is the fount of all other of the deadly sins, leading to pride of the flesh, covetousness of the flesh, anger in the thwarting of desire, gluttony to feed the spent body to be at it again, envy of the sexual prowess and sexual success of others, sloth to admit enervating day-dreams of lust. Only in the married state, by God’s holy grace, is it sanctified, for then it becomes the means of begetting fresh souls for the peopling of the Kingdom of Heaven." Show Less
Media reviews
Bookslut
The book's longest, best and most rewarding segment is a first-rate run of British suspense writing. Burgess ladles on rich characterization and the best kind of paranoia in this series of chapters aboard a cruise ship with only a handful of passengers and staff, a claustrophobic Agatha Christie
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environment where everyone is up to something and proper manners mask nefarious intent. Especially worthy of mention is a gruesome eating contest Hillier engages in with a fellow glutton. When Burgess sets himself a mark, he hits it, hard enough for the reader to feel and remember. Tremor's failure is in its larger effect, or lack of effect. Late in the book, Burgess the Joyce scholar finds diagetic excuses -- delirium, drug use -- to churn the text into passable but recognizably mid-Ulysses stylee cacophony, fragmenting phrases and words with punctuation, building elaborate homophonic pun games that are respectable accomplishments on their own terms but do the novel that contains them a distracting disservice. Show Less
Language
Original language
English
ISBN
0393346390 / 9780393346398
Physical description
272 p.; 5.5 inches
Pages
272