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Tuesday 11 December 2012

Advent 11

Earthly Powers - Anthony Burgess

I promised you the best opening line in literature and here it is,
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.
 
Anthony Burgess was a great talent, apparently slightly miffed at not getting his full critical dues. I have my own theory about this and it has to do with his sporting a quite atrocious comb-over. I might be wrong but I'm not sure that such a barnet has ever garnered the Nobel Prize. Mind you the frigging EU picked up its Peace Prize this week thus allowing Baroso to get all sanctimonious with us, so Burgess, were he alive, might feel he was in better company with all the rest of us who've never won anything.

Back to the novel - Earthly Powers lives up to all the promise of its wild beginning.

2 comments:

  1. Hmm not sure about that old thespian fellow. What about -
    Dark forest spruce frowned on either side of the frozen waterway.
    OR
    The boys name was Santiago. Dusk was falling as the boy arrived with his herd at the abandoned church.
    OR
    The stooping figure of my mother waist deep in the grass and caught there like a piece of sheep's wool, was the last I saw of my country home as I left to discover the world.

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  2. For the curious, these are: White Fang, The Alchemist, and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning respectively. All good suggestions and revelatory of a side of Viperjohn's character he often keeps hidden - I now unmask him as closet intellectual.

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