What do you think?
Rate this book
Three Graves
John Wilson dreamt of becoming a renowned composer. His first symphony lost in a bombed-out Manchester pub, John sets aside music for literature, writing under the name Anthony Burgess. Decades later, alone once more in the city, he encounters three spectres from his past. They refer to him as Our Jackie, and he senses the facade of Burgess begin to crumble. Walking rain-soaked streets he is drawn back to his past lives in pre-independent Malaya, wartime London, 1960s Europe, and 1970s America. Traversing continents, this once working-class lad becomes one of twentieth century Europe's literary greats, but what of those left behind, and of those bound to him and is it possible to recreate your own history? We've dug three graves for you, Mr Burgess. One for your body, One for your books, And one for your ego.
Hardcover
First published September 23, 2021
9 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 27, 2022
One reads a novelisation of an artist's life expecting - what? A more vivid and immediate version of biography. Perhaps The Real Life of Anthony Burgess by Andrew Biswell (unbelievably the only standalone biography of AB out there) embodied and given consciousness, an account of the successes and development of Burgess as novelist amid the swirling backdrop of his lived experience.
This devastating book comes unexpected, one which gets boldly intimate with the possible emotions of flesh-and-blood people, and in doing so, recreating one's man's jagged trajectory through his own life, brought low, with moments of despair and naked rage. Regret, disappointment, fear and fear of failure are recurrent specters in this account of Burgess. There is the occasional appearance of the jovial, witty, intelligent personality, larger-than-life, most familiar to readers of his books and essays and audiences of tv programmes and interviews. Which makes this depiction especially difficult, when this reader is made to bear witness: to how life lets him down again and again - because Life is messy, and because a second marriage is only symbolically a second chance (and chaotic life is stranger to neat symbols and the promise of being different, doing different) - and so hope rarely bears out in absolute clarity. Like witnessing a row explode between a couple, sometimes it makes for hard viewing. However this isn't just about Burgess; in his small cramped space of a small novel, Gregory also writes movingly about the emotional lives of his first wife Lynne and second wife Liana, as they reckon with him and their own burdens to bear, while deftly casting them as literary foils.
It is thrilling to find faithfulness to Burgess' experiences, the novel taking small biographical details from his autobiographies and giving them their place without seeming too contrived, but most of all, this reader takes joy in identifying his voice. That unmistakable, offhanded, unpolished spontaneity about him that is vitality itself, no matter what he is talking about. It is in 'I am a Mancunian', and colourfully in Enderby, gilding unaesthetic subjects with art: "Your presence shines above the fumes of fat / Glows from the oven-door. / Lithe with the litheness of the kitchen cat / Your image treads the floor / Ennobling the potato peel, the lumps / Of fallen bread, the vulgar cabbage-stumps. / 'Love!' Cry the eggs a-whisk, and 'Love!' the beef / Calls from the roasting tin. / The beetroot blushes love. Each lettuce-leaf / That hides the heart within / Is a green spring of love. Pudding and pie / Are richly crammed with love. And so am I." In the same vein there is a nice series of photos of Burgess cooking in the kitchen which goes really well with one scene in this novel.
An engagement with Burgess' life inevitably deals with the point that 'Anthony Burgess; is partly fiction, a creation of the author born John Anthony Burgess Wilson, and another of the novel's highlights is in how it plays with the duality of John Wilson (son of a pianoplayer, schoolboy, a man of necessary flesh and history) and Anthony Burgess (novelist, prose stylist, screenwriter, man on the book covers), and with the real man at the centre of these personae, the conflicted confluence between the quotidian and the transcendent, particularly between music as passion and playing music as an occupation. It is a novel of style, in its subtle shifts between past and present, the quiet brilliance of the use of the pronoun 'he' - one moment referencing Burgess-the-man/father, the next becoming either his father, or John Wilson-the-son. Burgess' attempts to reconcile himself with his father's occupation - curious and out-lived by the advent of sound cinema) are among the most touching moments: his father 'playing with all he had to put food on the table. He played with passion, a passion for getting on, for making ends meet' (page 258). In moments like these the prose almost runs away with itself and one could feel time standing still in beauty.
A question at the back of the book asks, What would Burgess himself have thought of this? In two autobiographies he has staked his own claim on an 'authentic' account of his life. Yet one feels sometimes, as he speaks of the more unsavoury and painful parts of his life and even the most vulgar or despairing, he can come off a bit of a prose stylist. Comparatively, this novel attempts to (fictionally) take the reader to possibly where even Burgess' more brutally honest moments in his autobiographies do not go. Reading this, one gains a sense of what he may have sought to conceal. But reading this, who can blame him? Who does not shy away from a full confrontation of his past? And who can/dares to reveal himself fully in front an audience? Who would put in his readers' face something that shows the worst of him in a way that he might even find hard to stomach - the tangs of bitterness, the raging tirades, moments where it seems he would drive himself into the ground abetted by an impulse of self-destruction.
At the end, this reader, like him, becomes haunted by whether everything he has ever made will last/endure. Coming from a man possessed by such gifts and the need to write and compose and create; it makes me want to go back and read everything he has ever written, to assure this half-fictional (who isn't?) persona that it will.
This devastating book comes unexpected, one which gets boldly intimate with the possible emotions of flesh-and-blood people, and in doing so, recreating one's man's jagged trajectory through his own life, brought low, with moments of despair and naked rage. Regret, disappointment, fear and fear of failure are recurrent specters in this account of Burgess. There is the occasional appearance of the jovial, witty, intelligent personality, larger-than-life, most familiar to readers of his books and essays and audiences of tv programmes and interviews. Which makes this depiction especially difficult, when this reader is made to bear witness: to how life lets him down again and again - because Life is messy, and because a second marriage is only symbolically a second chance (and chaotic life is stranger to neat symbols and the promise of being different, doing different) - and so hope rarely bears out in absolute clarity. Like witnessing a row explode between a couple, sometimes it makes for hard viewing. However this isn't just about Burgess; in his small cramped space of a small novel, Gregory also writes movingly about the emotional lives of his first wife Lynne and second wife Liana, as they reckon with him and their own burdens to bear, while deftly casting them as literary foils.
It is thrilling to find faithfulness to Burgess' experiences, the novel taking small biographical details from his autobiographies and giving them their place without seeming too contrived, but most of all, this reader takes joy in identifying his voice. That unmistakable, offhanded, unpolished spontaneity about him that is vitality itself, no matter what he is talking about. It is in 'I am a Mancunian', and colourfully in Enderby, gilding unaesthetic subjects with art: "Your presence shines above the fumes of fat / Glows from the oven-door. / Lithe with the litheness of the kitchen cat / Your image treads the floor / Ennobling the potato peel, the lumps / Of fallen bread, the vulgar cabbage-stumps. / 'Love!' Cry the eggs a-whisk, and 'Love!' the beef / Calls from the roasting tin. / The beetroot blushes love. Each lettuce-leaf / That hides the heart within / Is a green spring of love. Pudding and pie / Are richly crammed with love. And so am I." In the same vein there is a nice series of photos of Burgess cooking in the kitchen which goes really well with one scene in this novel.
An engagement with Burgess' life inevitably deals with the point that 'Anthony Burgess; is partly fiction, a creation of the author born John Anthony Burgess Wilson, and another of the novel's highlights is in how it plays with the duality of John Wilson (son of a pianoplayer, schoolboy, a man of necessary flesh and history) and Anthony Burgess (novelist, prose stylist, screenwriter, man on the book covers), and with the real man at the centre of these personae, the conflicted confluence between the quotidian and the transcendent, particularly between music as passion and playing music as an occupation. It is a novel of style, in its subtle shifts between past and present, the quiet brilliance of the use of the pronoun 'he' - one moment referencing Burgess-the-man/father, the next becoming either his father, or John Wilson-the-son. Burgess' attempts to reconcile himself with his father's occupation - curious and out-lived by the advent of sound cinema) are among the most touching moments: his father 'playing with all he had to put food on the table. He played with passion, a passion for getting on, for making ends meet' (page 258). In moments like these the prose almost runs away with itself and one could feel time standing still in beauty.
A question at the back of the book asks, What would Burgess himself have thought of this? In two autobiographies he has staked his own claim on an 'authentic' account of his life. Yet one feels sometimes, as he speaks of the more unsavoury and painful parts of his life and even the most vulgar or despairing, he can come off a bit of a prose stylist. Comparatively, this novel attempts to (fictionally) take the reader to possibly where even Burgess' more brutally honest moments in his autobiographies do not go. Reading this, one gains a sense of what he may have sought to conceal. But reading this, who can blame him? Who does not shy away from a full confrontation of his past? And who can/dares to reveal himself fully in front an audience? Who would put in his readers' face something that shows the worst of him in a way that he might even find hard to stomach - the tangs of bitterness, the raging tirades, moments where it seems he would drive himself into the ground abetted by an impulse of self-destruction.
At the end, this reader, like him, becomes haunted by whether everything he has ever made will last/endure. Coming from a man possessed by such gifts and the need to write and compose and create; it makes me want to go back and read everything he has ever written, to assure this half-fictional (who isn't?) persona that it will.
October 9, 2021
Loved this biographical novel about Anthony Burgess. Fantastic debut from Sean Gregory. Makes me want to read more Burgess (and check his music)
November 3, 2022
this was a wild fuggin ride !
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews