The Wanting Seed (Norton Paperback Fiction)
by Anthony Burgess
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Book Summary Information
Author: Anthony BurgessEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1996-12-17
ISBN: 0393315088
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Book Reviews of The Wanting Seed (Norton Paperback Fiction)
Book Review: Better than Clockwork Orange... Yes!
Summary: 5 Stars
(Written for Worm's Sci Fi Haven by countezero, more of his reviews can be read here: www.wormsscifi.com/haven)
Had Anthony Burgess done something more than write novels that read like fiendishly clever jokes played out at the expense of the literati, he may very well have found his name among the titans of 20th century writers when he died in 1993.
Of the innumerable works Burgess wrote, only a handful of titles remain in print today, all of which share a delicate connection, of some sort, to other literary genres or to actual titans themselves. There's Re Joyce, which I'm sure everyone can easily attach to its provocateur, Nothing Like the Sun, an homage to a certain William Shakespeare, Honey for Bears, which tackles Cold War paranoia by producing a humorous comedy of errors told with the serious confines of a spy novel. All struggle to escape the impressive geometry that is both the foundation and the catalyst for their narrative.
If you are unfamiliar with these works, rest assured you are not alone. The larger world, science fiction fans and film enthusiasts included, know Burgess only for a curious exercise in language he conducted called A Clockwork Orange, a novella whose merits and flaws long ago drowned under the powerful imagery and arresting violence of the Stanley Kubrick film that bears the same name. Having tackled both the morality play and the bildungsroman at the same time with A Clockwork Orange, two genres I feel certain Alex and his devilish little droogs were meant to be making fun of, he set his sites firmly on the theater of future in novel called The Wanting Seed (1962), which can be summed up as a dystopian comedy, if there is such a thing-and if there isn't, so much the better for the punch line of Burgess's grim joke.
To write a dystopian novel, one must seize on some sort ideology or philosophy or another and forecast its ultimate (evil) end, as George Orwell did with socialism in 1984 and Aldous Huxley did with liberalism in Brave New World. True to a novel whose vocabulary often relies on words like rosacea (which means "of roses," according to my Latin dictionary) to describe a person's acne, Burgess has chosen the (somewhat obscure) theories of Thomas Malthus, whose influential Essay on Population (1798) is known, perhaps, to only the most rigorous academics. The nearest mention of Malthus in popular culture is just a few lines above this one, for Huxley called his morning-after birth control agenda the Malthusian-drill in Brave New World. How best to describe Malthus' pessimistic theory of the future? Above all, his writing searches in vain for a "balance between population increase and natural resources." The failure of such balance, which Malthus, like any good prophet of doom, foretold, is the fulcrum for the plot in The Wanting Seed, a devastating novel of practical appraisals that opens with Tristram Foxe and his wife Beatrice-Joanna, the main protagonists, voluntarily putting their child to death at something called the Ministry of Infertility. "One mouth less to feed. One more half-kilo of phosphorus pentoxide to nourish the earth," the doctor says to assuage the grieving mother.
This is the world of rampant overpopulation, where disease, old age, war, pestilence, poverty have all been conquered-to the apparent detriment of human existence. Because of the boom in healthy living, children are almost forbidden and fornication with the opposite sex frowned upon as a waste of energy-"it's sapiens to be homo," a government billboard proclaims in the first few pages of the book.
But as it turns out, Beatrice happens to be something of a woman who enjoys sex with randy men. "She needed two men in her life, her day to be salted with infidelity," Burgess writes. Unbeknownst to her husband, she has taken up with his brother, Derek, a man of some importance at the Ministry of Infertility, who also happens to be masquerading as a homosexual, lipstick, public effeminacy and all, because he is bucking for promotion. Before their tryst, and Beatrice's subsequent impregnation, can be fully discovered, society, as all the Foxes' know it, begins to flake and crumble from an ever increasing inability to feed everyone. The eventual results are both comical and serious. While Tristram rots in jail (thanks to his brother's manipulations) and Beatrice escapes to her sisters to give birth to twins, greater England fantastically reverts to a desperate bacchanalian state of existence, with lavish orgies that anticipate participation in cannibalistic dinners. The totalitarian government recognizes a good thing when it sees it and embraces the new trends, reinstalling religion and warning of a war brewing on the nation's collective horizon. Tristram, freed from jail and on the road searching for his wife, recognizes the shift in politics, but is incapable of doing anything about it-as with all dystopias, this is not a novel of heroes and happy endings, but of people "making the best of things" in circumstances well beyond their control. Like everyone else, he must eat. His stomach eventually leads him to the army, where he suddenly and unexpectedly finds himself fighting in this foreordained war-a war with no enemies and no political goals, and whose actual purpose is one of frightening utility.
Like its author's career, The Wanting Seed suffers, I think, when compared to the lofty peers it shares a particular playing field with, but even so, I've never found a book anywhere that is as penetratingly ironic and humorous as this one. One doesn't laugh when they read Orwell or Huxley, but the reader finds him or herself forced to chuckle when in the midst of this novel's various tribulations. As is the case with most forms of laughter, with The Wanting Seed, we laugh out of self-defense and from familiarity.
Is it as good as A Clockwork Orange? No, it's better.
Five out of Five
Summary of The Wanting Seed (Norton Paperback Fiction)
Set in the near future, The Wanting Seed is a Malthusian comedy about the strange world overpopulation will produce.
Tristram Foxe and his wife, Beatrice-Joanna, live in their skyscraper world where official family limitation glorifies homosexuality. Eventually, their world is transformed into a chaos of cannibalistic dining-clubs, fantastic fertility rituals, and wars without anger. It is a novel both extravagantly funny and grimly serious.Classics Books
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