Any
Old Iron by Anthony Burgess is a work that almost defies description. The only
way to get a sense of its world is to enter it by reading the book. The novel’s
journey is vast, it’s absurdity often hilarious and its dark humour often
tinged with a biting perception of the real.
As
with many Anthony Burgess novels, the start is staggering. The first hundred
pages - as is usual for Anthony Burgess - race past at a hilarious pace.
Reginald Morrow Jones - inevitably Vegetable Marrow Jones to his friends – is a
Welshman. Enough said… So was King Arthur. What links them? Precious little
until you have read the book and then, perhaps, quite a lot less.
But
then, as ever with this author, after the initial headlong spurt the pace seems
to fall away. It could come as a relief to many readers, since being dragged
along at the rate of the opening could easily exhaust. There is, of course, the
necessity to develop the characters and their predicaments. Anthony Burgess
does this by viewing their lives from different perspectives. This works in
part, but the overall similarity of style tends to blur this use of different
points of view.
Merely
listing the scenarios in which the characters find themselves raises the
breathing rate. Anthony Burgess does not need to reinvent history so that his
characters may live through it. So, in Any Old Iron, we have a Titanic
survivor, Russians in New York with a restaurant business and a sex-starved
daughter who seems to like the new cook. After a visit to the First World War,
there’s an escapade or two on the streets of St Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad
eventually - take your pick - as the Russian revolution unfolds. We participate.
This is a long way from Wales, about twenty pages or so. Somehow we find
ourselves in Manchester. There is a Jewish family with an even more sex-starved
daughter. She takes up percussion with her musical ear. World War Two? Thought
you would never mention it… Yes, let’s have a bit of that. How about a trek
across the frozen wastes of the Soviet Union? Did I forget the posting to
Gibraltar that had such a profound effect on a soldier’s career? And what about
fluency in Spanish? Where did that come in? National identity is always good
for the soul, so while we are talking about the foundation of Israel, why don’t
we have a bash at Welsh independence?
The
text is peppered with puns, intellectual references, linguistic tricks and
occasional insight. We learn, for instance, in quite relevant circumstances,
that for Russians water and vodka are regarded as being just about the same
thing, the letter k being the only difference. We learn that a letter A
embossed on a once shiny, now corroded steel sword originally signified
ownership by one Attila the Hun. I mean, can we really dislike Attila the Hun?
The same sword later became the property of one Arthur of Wales, the legendary
King Arthur of the Knights and Round Tables. The sword, by the way, was later
nicked, by theft, not corrosion, and had to be nicked back via an inside job at
the Ermitage in Leningrad. (Got the name right this time…) Oh, and there’s that
tour of duty in Gibraltar, where a serviceman kills an off duty German as part
of the war effort and is accused of murder. What about the trek across a Soviet
winter? Already mentioned that…
Any
Old Iron, frankly, defies description. Right from the first paragraph, “I’m no
metallurgist, merely a retired terrorist and teacher of philosophy” to the
last, “It was a pity that Reg had lost his sense of smell,” Any Old Iron taunts
the reader with innuendo, humour, double-entendre, intellectual challenge and
linguistic trick. What it perhaps does not do is offer a rounded and familiar
character that we thoroughly get to know. But part of the point in this novel
that addresses ideas of identity is that none of us is knowable in that way.
Life presents itself and we live it as it comes along. Circumstance, chance,
imagined magical association and loyalty are all quite real and often get in
the way. Any Old Iron is seriously funny.
No comments:
Post a Comment