An entertaining book that flexes its literary muscles, but I found it less interesting than expected. ( )

Great. ( )

In 2019 and beyond, you will either like Burgess or you will very much not like Burgess. I tire easily of many of the verbose old anti-establishment-but-really-part-of-the-establishment white men of late 20th century fiction (Amis, for instance, sometimes Roth, even Pynchon). But then there are others like Mailer whom I adore. Burgess must fit into the latter category.

Still, I am a member of my generation, and can't fully pretend that the length and precocity of the novel are justified! A piece of worth, but which nevertheless has been overvalued. ( )

In a way this book serves as an indictment of the last thirty years of gay literature. If a story could be published in 1980 featuring a man who was openly gay from World War One right through the rest of his life, why are we still subjected to so many narratives in which characters spend most or all of their time in the closet? Although not all writers can be expected to have the courage of Burgess, I look forward to the day when gay writers move on from regarding coming out as the peak gay experience.

As well as courage, this book is full of wit, style, insightful characterisation and intellectual challenge. It's something of a shame that a portion of this intellectual challenge failed to really engage me as it focuses on questions regarding the role of the Catholic church, Christianity and religion in the modern world. As an atheist born and raised, I am comfortable with my answers to these questions (none, none and none), but I did find stimulation in many other ideas relating to family, sexuality, art and purpose.

The reader is effortlessly and repeatedly charmed and then pushed back to arms length using all of the tools of the postmodern first person narrator. This is a finely balanced and dangerous trick, of course, and while passages of this book are absolutely wonderful - simultaneously playful and affecting - there are also some passages that I found flat, unnecessary or irrelevant, particularly in the latter half of the book. It is definitely at its best in the first third when the story is at its most preposterous and the narrator is at his most combative and frank.

This will go on the list of my favourite four star books - not quite sublime, but dearly loved.

Oh, and without wanting to sound pedantic, the Amazon Kindle edition of this book is a bit of a dog's breakfast. It has clearly been scanned from the text and many of the mistakes of the software remain (joining "ci" and "cl" into d, so that I'm not sure you ever see "clothes", only "dothes"; extraneous commas that the author could never have intended; etc). The consequence of this is that a reader is never quite sure whether an irregularity (eg. two words joined together) is for stylistic reasons or just as a result of technology failure. ( )

An astonishing tour de force that starts off as a kind of reworked biography of Somerset Maugham but soon morphs into the most incredible criticism of belief and the workings of miracle. Everything ties together superbly, and as a guide to an alternative-but-real 20th century this cannot be easily bettered. ( )