Beds in the East - Anthony Burgess

Beds in the East is the final part of Burgess's Malayan Trilogy (1956-59). Set in the final days of British colonial rule, the ethnically diverse natives are starting to take over as the Brits fade away. Likewise in the narrative - our hero Victor Crabbe enters late and leaves before the end. He just disappears, which I felt was a masterly touch from Burgess.

Crabbe's reduced role means that Burgess can concentrate more on the 'natives', only some of whom are actually Malays. There is also the extensive Chinese community and the close-knit Tamils, all of them jockeying for status in the new independent Malaya. Among them is Robert Loo, son of a Chinese cafe proprietor, who is certainly a self-taught musical prodigy and whom Crabbe considers a genius. He tries to get a commission for Robert to write a Malayan anthem for the independence ceremonies and a scholarship to get him to a conservatory in England or America. There is Sayed Omar, who believes he has been blackballed for promotion by the fiendish Tamil Maniam and seeks his revenge. There is Maniam's Tamil friend (the Tamils are all 'friends') the vet Vythilingam, desperately trying to avoid the arranged marriages his mother is equally determined to oversee.

Linking them all, and messing up all their plans, is the mixed race sex bomb Rosemary, who pretends she is English, who pretends her British fiance Joe is really going to send for her, and who lives amid her dozens of cats and a similar number of (largely) frustrated admirers. Rosemary is unusual for Burgess (a dominant female character) and I wonder why he didn't create more in his later work. I suppose there is the Dark Lady in Nothing Like the Sun, but I don't recall any others.

You can feel Burgess stretching his wings in Beds in the East, really hitting his novelistic stride. He is happy to let his syntax loose, happy to flaunt his own musical prowess without feeling the need to explain it. At the same time it finishes off his debut trilogy beautifully.

The Enemy in the Blanket - Anthony Burgess

Part two of The Malayan Trilogy sees Victor Crabbe and his long-suffering wife Fenella dispatched to one of the furthest outposts of the tottering colony. Crabbe is technically head of the local school but, typically, soon finds himself carousing with a new mistress and an old college friend. This friend, Rupert Hardman, fills the place of Nabby Adams in The Enemy in the Blanket. Like Nabby, Hardman likes Malaya and desperately wants to make a career there. Where Nabby was notable for his size, with Hardman it is his colouring - he is whiter than white, even whiter in the damaged tissue where his face was burnt during his wartime service with the RAF. He is a lawyer and not an especially bad one, but he just cannot find a way of breaking through into success. Again, like Adams, he has debts everywhere, though not for booze; in Hardman's case it is the necessities of life that throw him into debt - food, accommodation, a halfway decent suit for court. Hardman is so determined to be a success that he makes the ultimate sacrifice and converts to Islam and marries Normah, a rich and voluptuous widow. Like Burgess, Hardman is a Catholic, so his mercenary switch of faith costs him the only real friend he had in Dahaga, the saintly priest Laforgue. Meanwhile Normah turns out to be a demanding wife. She has needs. She drops sinister hints about what happened to her previous spouses when they failed to meet those needs.

Crabbe, of course, floats happily down the stream of failure. He has the chance to slake his sexual needs with the feisty Anne Talbot. He tolerates the machinations of his Machiavellian deputy head Jaganathan. He tolerates the idea that Fenella is compensating for his shortcomings by having an affair with the Abang, the real ruler of Dahaga.

The plot resolves beautifully, with real moments of tenderness between Crabbe and his disappointed women. Hardman makes a desperate bolt for freedom. Jaganathan gets his comeuppance and life rolls on in Malaya like a runaway bulldozer - all to the benign amusement of a chorus of lackadaisical Sihks. Burgess's second novel is a significant step forward in his literary development. It is comic, clever, a splendid depiction of the last sputterings of Empire.

Time for a Tiger - Anthony Burgess

Time for a Tiger was Burgess's first novel, the first in his Malayan Trilogy aka The Long Day Wanes. It was published in 1956 while he was still teaching in Malaya. The novel is a thinly disguised version of Burgess's actual experience. Victor Crabbe teaches in Kuala Hantor; Anthony Burgess taught in Kuala Kangsar; both are/were house masters; both have/had deeply unhappy wives and fractious relationships with their respective headmasters, who they loathe.

Crabbe's counterpoint, the six-foot-eight policeman and fledgling alcoholic is Nabby Adams, a man wholly devoted to expatriate life in the failing empire. He it is who always has time for a Tiger, the bottled beer which is his only sustenance. Nabby owes money to everyone. Where Crabbe might seek to enlighten the multi-national, multi-cultural natives, Nabby takes them absolutely as he finds them. He loves them like he loves his scabby dog Cough. Crabbe cares too, but his way is patronising, accidentally elitist. And this, of course, is the time of the Chinese Communist-inspired Malayan insurgency.

It is, however, an English comic novel in a colonial setting, falling somewhere between Kipling and Paul Scott. It is a long way from the experimental Burgess of the Seventies, or even A Clockwork Orange, which was only six years on from Time for a Tiger. It is, nevertheless, a comic novel that is actually funny, with complex characters and the occasional hint of the linguistic fireworks that were to come.

Everyone who reads later Burgess should also read early Burgess. I was lucky, I suppose, in that I first read the Malayan Trilogy just after I read A Clockwork Orange, which was around the time the Kubrick film came out. Me and a couple of mates went to see the movie, in a rare single showing outside London at the height of the controversy. It's appropriately Burgessian, I think, that what may have been the only time the film was shown in a mainstream provincial picture palace was at the Odeon Rugby. I know it happened 'cos I was there.