THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

intricately translated into an omnifarious masque and a proliferating orgy of mythology and literature. In Fowles’s
most
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popular and admired novel, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), the juxtapositions of repression and release
serve to dictate not just the novel’s argument, but its narrative shape as well. The novel’s narrator looks back,
somewhat smugly, from the moral and narrative redefinitions of the 1960s, ‘the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and
Roland Barthes’, to the narrower determinants of doing and telling in the 1860s. He both appreciates the art of the
Victorian novel and feels infinitely superior to it. His central characters, a Darwinian palaeontologist, Charles
Smithson, and the supposedly abandoned mistress of the French lieutenant, Sarah Woodruff, play out his theme for
him. Both seek to break ‘iron certainties’, the social, moral, and religious conventions of their day, much as the
narrator consistently endeavours to remind us of his presence and of his very present power. Sarah tricks and eludes
Charles, just as the narrator rejoices in his own tricksy elusiveness. He admits in his thirteenth chapter (typically
choosing what has always been regarded as a dangerous number) that he ‘stands next to God’, but insists that liberal
modern novelists ‘are no longer the gods of the Victorian image, omniscient and decreeing; but in the new theological
image, with freedom our first principle, not authority’. God-like to the end, he offers his readers a trinity of possible
conclusions to the narrative; one conventionally happy; one unconventionally happy; the last uncertain and open. In
the final chapter a ‘rather foppish and Frenchified’ figure, with ‘more than a touch of the successful impresario about
him’, adjusts his watch and seems to obliterate the second possible ending. This impresario drives ‘briskly’ away,
supposedly leaving Charles to his freedom and his doubts, but he remains a god who has declined to stop interfering.
Anthony Burgess’s narrators tend to be just as knowing as Fowles’s, but they are far less tricksy, cocky, and
manipulative. Kenneth Toomey, the autobiographical narrator of Earthly Powers (1980), loves effects. His ‘It was the
afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had
come to see me’ is perhaps the most striking opening sentence in modern English literature. But he also loves
‘cunning’ and ‘contrivance’ and he knows the power of popular story-telling. Toomey, a Catholic, a homosexual, and
a successful writer, bestrides the twentieth century without seeking the status of a colossus. He travels across the five
continents; he finds himself close to ‘Hitler . . . Mussolini and the rest of the terrible people this terrible century’s
thrown up’; he strikes up acquaintances with Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Ford Madox Ford, and Kipling; and he finds
himself the brother-in-law of a saintly, sybaritic (and fictional) Pope. As so often in Burgess’s earlier work, Earthly
Powers is an entertaining exploration of moral antinomy. In his futuristic fantasy, The Wanting Seed (1962), he had
somewhat slickly proposed that human moral history could be seen as evolving cyclically, swinging between
Augustinian ages (‘Gusphases’, in which the concept of original sin is paramount), ‘Interphases’, and Pelagian ages
(‘Pelaphases’, in which liberal humanism triumphs). Burgess’s preoccupation with the theology and sociology of sin
also determines the argument of his most
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brilliant and experimental novel, A Clockwork Orange (also of 1962). It is a sharply anti-utopian vision of the
technological future, told from the point of view of Alex, a 15-year-old delinquent who fantasizes about rape, assault,
and murder while listening to Mozart. It also throws down two distinct challenges to its readers. When, in Part 2 of
the novel, Alex is brain-washed into conformity (‘committed to socially acceptable acts, a little machine capable only
of good’) it questions the sentimentally framed ideals of freedom and social responsibility which were dear to the
liberal 1960s. Secondly, and perhaps more disconcertingly, Burgess renders his narrator sympathetic by contrasting
his geniality and vitality with the numb, soullessness of the society which has produced his reaction. Moreover,
Burgess seems to make his readers complicit in what Alex thinks and does by obliging them to share in his lexical
rebellion and his lexical excitement. Alex expresses himself in ‘nadsat’, a Russian-rooted argot, which is abbreviated,
aggressive, rich, and strange (‘Then we slooshied the sirens and knew the millicents were coming with pooshkas ...
That weepy little devotchka had told them, no doubt, there being a box for calling rozzes not too far behind the Muni
Power Plant’). If Burgess’s work as a whole does not manage to rival the epic vitality of Joyce’s, A Clockwork Orange
does at least shift something of Joyce’s linguistic ingenuity into the age of subcultures.
In some ways the most ‘typical’ (at least in the sociological sense) of the English novelists of the 1960s and 1970s
is Margaret Drabble (b. 1939). Her first novel, A Summer Bird-Cage (1963), is a first-person narrative describing the
gossipy, sexually liberated, party-going worlds of a university-educated woman and her married sister. Jerusalem the
Golden (1967) is a far more assured, and far less jerky, account of another woman-graduate, this time a girl growing
out of the cultural and moral narrowness of her northern background and opening up to what we are led to believe are
the sophistications of high-brow London (including its bohemian male adulterers). Of her novels of the 1970s,
perhaps the most artful and suggestive is The Ice Age (1977), a novel centred not on a woman exploring the process