Babel

by Alan Burns

In what amounts to the first intergalactic SOS from a planet on the point of a collapse into chaos, Alan Burns captures the reality of our contemporary confusion of tongues - linguistic or otherwise. By means of aphorisms, newspaper clichés ("The Prime Minister is uncertain in the sense that he was taken over by the Army today."), poems, snatches of conversation and anecdote, his new novel Babel reaches the wholly original point of representing the swollen inhumanity of late Western civilisation the way the Tower of Babel itself was a symbol of mutual incomprehension.
This new Babel has a smash cast of characters, including Norman Vincent Peale, David Frost, General Westmoreland, Chinese girls, Terrorists, a Scottish sexologist, and a vegetarian.

Genres: Novels

159 pages, Hardcover

First published December 31, 1967

About the author

Alan Burns published eight novels, two essay collections, a play, and a short story collection. Major works include Europe After the Rain, Celebrations, Babel, and Dreamerika! A Surrealist Fantasy. From the 1960s on, he was associated with the loosely-constituted circle of experimental British writers influenced by Rayner Heppenstall that included Stefan Themerson, Eva Figes, Ann Quin and its informal leader, B. S. Johnson.

In 1982 he co-edited (with Charles Sugnet) The Imagination on Trial: British and American Writers Discuss Their Working Methods, which the Washington Post "Book World" called "diverting, iconoclastic, and compulsively readable". The book included interviews with 11 authors (as well as Burns himself): J. G. Ballard, Eva Figes, John Gardner, Wilson Harris, John Hawkes, B. S. Johnson, Tom Mallin, Michael Moorcock, Grace Paley, Ishmael Reed, and Alan Sillitoe.

Angus Wilson called Burns "one of the two or three most interesting new novelists working in England."

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

Burns’s most successful “aleatoric” novel is Dreamerika! This, however, is a collection of dolorous and darkly funny vignettes: wonderfully unique word-sculptures that create disturbing and befuddling images and moods in the reader, written in Burns’s own “babel” style that performs impressive feats with the English language. The act of reading this becomes a trudge, even for me, who is in thrall to surreal nonsense, however, Burns’s ambitious novel and others in his oeuvre need more respect and readership. Factish.

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

The two took their words together by the use of lips, he cut the word out of her nose, he would prefer her teeth. Her heart was a sound in his opinion, with infinite possibilities, her moving parts worked well. The police were involved in the business, they arrived at his office to discuss the extortion case, she knew nothing, her eye was rued inadmissible. The trial for rape was the same. The allegation was withdrawn before the offense was committed.

Uneasy dystopian (contemporary 60s-era Britain?) news items composed seemingly under the twinned signs of Cut-Up Technique and Surrealism. For maximum effect, open at random and read allowed to an unsuspecting audience.

I had a long essay here about the taxonomy of nonsense in literature (Babel's occurs at the sentence and narrative levels while maintaining thematic continuities, and wholly-sensical words and clauses), but it was lost in to the aether(net), so this will do for now.

[Thomas · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is an experimental book written using a cut up technique, a lot of the sentences or sections are cool but it doesn't really work longform and ends up just being kind of irritating to read.

[Marc Nash]

DNF'd

[Jonathan · Rating 2 out of 5]

So it turns out the only cut-up techniques I like are those practiced by Mr David Bowie.

http://youtu.be/m1InCrzGIPU