A stranger to the truth

Anthony Burgess was someone whose accomplishment as a fibber far surpassed even that of such formidable rivals as Laurens van der Post, Lilian Hellman and Patrick O’Brian. What made fibbing particularly perilous for Burgess, as for most fibbers, was that he rarely remembered his fibs. In consequence they varied widely from telling to telling.

The best example of this is the case of the son, Paolo Andrea, of the Italian woman, Liana, whom Burgess precipitately took as his second wife within five or six weeks of the death of his first wife, Lynne. In a 1968 Spectator essay, ‘Thoughts of a Belated Father’, Burgess announced that, having just remarried (in fact the marriage did not take place until three days later), he had acquired a four-year-old stepson. This would seem to be accurate, since the boy’s birth certificate gives the name of his biological father as Roy Lionel Halliday, Liana’s then husband. But eventually Burgess transmuted stepson into son. Having acquired this pathetic trophy, he then treated him with neglect and indifference, as Biswell vividly recounts.

After a dry, sparse start, in which the story of Burgess’s early years relies too much on his autobiography and novels, Biswell is excellent on Burgess’s army career and his work as a teacher in Malaya in the mid-Fifties. Out of the tempestuous and unhappy experiences of that exile Burgess eventually created the trilogy that is, in my view, his finest literary achievement. In it, Lynne is represented with searing accuracy as a character clinging on to life in a state of intermittent rage and despair. When not sprawled on the bed with a gin bottle and a Jane Austen novel, she is making drunken scenes in seedy bars or sleeping with anyone on offer.