BIOGRAPHY: Roger Lewis's strange book, though occasionally tiresome, is admirably stuffed full of laugh-aloud jokes and rude remarks. It is indeed the funniest biography - if that is what it is - I have read in years. But who, one wonders, is the big joke on? asks Enda O'Doherty.
Anthony Burgess. By Roger Lewis. Faber & Faber, 434pp. £20
'It is difficult to murder a corpse," wrote one critic of a 1994 biography of Graham Greene, "but Mr Shelden does his best." It did indeed seem at the time that Michael Shelden was taking the genre of biography by hatchet as far as it could go, but eight years of human progress later he has been confidently trumped by the truly astounding level of vilification Roger Lewis has managed to bring to bear on his "biographee", the distinguished novelist, broadcaster, literary journalist and composer Anthony Burgess, who died in 1993.
Those who recall Burgess's showy erudition, fruity delivery and apparently boundless self-confidence may well have put him down as a man who, for all his gifts, was a little - perhaps more than a little - on the pompous side.
But it seems pomposity was only the start of it. By Lewis's account, the monster Burgess was, in no particular order, misanthropic, vain, pretentious, miserly, cold, self-pitying, greedy, mean, paranoid, mendacious, paedophiliac - and, oh yes, he combed his hair into a whorl to hide his bald patch.
For all his worldly success and recognition, the great polymath apparently felt an outsider all his life and, like his hero Joyce, soon opted for exile and cunning - silence he found more difficult. The snobbish literary establishment, he was sure, despised him for his Catholicism and his provincial origins (he "only" went to Manchester University), while just about everyone was jealous of his astonishing literary fecundity and the considerable financial rewards it eventually brought him.
Money did not make him happy - though, as is so often the case, this did not stop him wanting more of it. In his final decades, he was prepared to take on any project, no matter how trashy, go anywhere or talk to anyone, so long as the fee was good and all expenses - including drinks - were paid.
His personal life was a mess. His first wife, Lynne, was a fearsome alcoholic - "once you'd seen her project a stream of vomit, like the trumpet of the Archangel Gabriel, six feet across a room, you'd seen everything", writes Lewis. She once shouted at Prince Philip. "Welsh, is she?" asked the Duke.
Perhaps none of this would have mattered much if the old boy had had any literary talent. But apparently his only works of merit were the novels that made up the Malayan trilogy, and that was back in the 1950s. All the rest - Earthly Powers, the Enderby novels, A Clockwork Orange, Nothing Like the Sun - yes, they were clever, with a certain snap and crackle even, the best of them, yet empty and essentially devoid of anything human and lasting.
Lewis has a curious biographical style, curious enough to make one wonder is this biography at all one is dealing with. His technique is to bounce between vigorous assault on the literary works and dogged rebuttal of the various claims of Burgess's autobiographical volumes. At the same time, he appears content to leave huge chronological gaps in the life; nor does he appear to have consulted all sources available to him (correspondence, diaries).
Such abstinence cannot be due to lack of space, since he is prepared to treat even the most trivial and recondite of information at enormous length in his gargantuan footnotes (or indeed commandeer them to sneer at his own literary enemies). Could he, one wonders, possibly be mimicking the master? One footnote in particular, where he refers approvingly (in relation to Theroux and Naipaul) to "the device of the disenchanted Boswell", finally makes one begin to suspect that all here may not be quite what it seems, a suspicion later confirmed by reading an extremely bizarre interview conducted last month with Internet journalist Tess Crebbin, where Lewis sensationally withdraws virtually every nasty claim made in his book about Burgess and speaks instead of his "admiration and affection" for this "charming", "gracious", "kind", "gentle", "loyal", "sensitive" and "deeply religious" man. The scintillating star witness for the prosecution has, it seems, suddenly and ignominiously collapsed under mild pressure from defence counsel.
Just what exactly is going on here? Roger Lewis's strange book, though occasionally tiresome, is admirably stuffed full of laugh-aloud jokes and rude remarks. It is indeed the funniest biography - if that is what it is - I have read in years. But who, one wonders, is the big joke on? The academics? The reviewers? The reader? Perhaps his publisher would like to tell us.
And next time, I think, Mr Lewis should write a novel.
Enda O'Doherty is an Irish Times journalist