The Wanting Seed

(Written for Worm's Sci Fi Haven by countezero, more of his reviews can be read here: www.wormsscifi.com/haven) Had Anthony Burgess done something more than write novels that read like fiendishly clever jokes played out at the expense of the literati, he may very well have found his name among the titans of 20th century writers when he died in 1993. Of the innumerable works Burgess wrote, only a handful of titles remain in print today, all of which share a delicate connection, of some sort, to other literary genres or to actual titans themselves. There's Re Joyce, which I'm sure everyone can easily attach to its provocateur, Nothing Like the Sun, an homage to a certain William Shakespeare, Honey for Bears, which tackles Cold War paranoia by producing a humorous comedy of errors told with the serious confines of a spy novel. All struggle to escape the impressive geometry that is both the foundation and the catalyst for their narrative. If you are unfamiliar with these works, rest assured you are not alone. The larger world, science fiction fans and film enthusiasts included, know Burgess only for a curious exercise in language he conducted called A Clockwork Orange, a novella whose merits and flaws long ago drowned under the powerful imagery and arresting violence of the Stanley Kubrick film that bears the same name. Having tackled both the morality play and the bildungsroman at the same time with A Clockwork Orange, two genres I feel certain Alex and his devilish little droogs were meant to be making fun of, he set his sites firmly on the theater of future in novel called The Wanting Seed (1962), which can be summed up as a dystopian comedy, if there is such a thing-and if there isn't, so much the better for the punch line of Burgess's grim joke. To write a dystopian novel, one must seize on some sort ideology or philosophy or another and forecast its ultimate (evil) end, as George Orwell did with socialism in 1984 and Aldous Huxley did with liberalism in Brave New World. True to a novel whose vocabulary often relies on words like rosacea (which means "of roses," according to my Latin dictionary) to describe a person's acne, Burgess has chosen the (somewhat obscure) theories of Thomas Malthus, whose influential Essay on Population (1798) is known, perhaps, to only the most rigorous academics. The nearest mention of Malthus in popular culture is just a few lines above this one, for Huxley called his morning-after birth control agenda the Malthusian-drill in Brave New World. How best to describe Malthus' pessimistic theory of the future? Above all, his writing searches in vain for a "balance between population increase and natural resources." The failure of such balance, which Malthus, like any good prophet of doom, foretold, is the fulcrum for the plot in The Wanting Seed, a devastating novel of practical appraisals that opens with Tristram Foxe and his wife Beatrice-Joanna, the main protagonists, voluntarily putting their child to death a

For those who have read A Clockwork Orange, The Wanting Seed is a great second Burgess book to read to get you into an awesome author. The story is also set in the future, where overpopulation is a prevalent problem and unstable governments are in control. With deft wit and careful plot planning, Burgess acts out a political theory through the course of the story--that a supremely liberal government falls to anarchy, then to extreme conservativism as a natural cycle. The metaphor is seamless, and so is Burgess's always clever writing. The characters are led through a parade of adultery, seclusion, cannibalism and unnecessary war in a study of human propagatory nature and the forces that move social institutions. Yes, in the end, Burgess's characters turn out to be more means to the end of his overarching ideas, but the ideas are so fruitful and the plot is so engrossing that it works very well as a whole. Recommended for fans of 1984, Vonnegut, and other Burgess works.

Your bookstore is stocked full of novels predicting mankind's future, but none quite like this. With the Wanting Seed, Anthony Burgess turns the typical dystopian novel on its ear. Instead of a methodical, technorganic world, Mr. Burgess presents a smelly, macrobiotic mess of overpopulation and disharmony. Instead of a more stringent emphasis on rightwing ideals, the aforementioned overpopulation has caused an enthusiastic governmental endorsement of homosexuality and opposition to typical family ideals. Instead of a grim, foreboding atmosphere, Mr. Burgess employs a lighthearted, quirky tone, allowing readers to smirk at the ridiculousness and incongruity to which the world of the Wanting Seed has been driven. It is obvious that Mr. Burgess, the same literary practical joker who filled his best-know book, A Clockwork Orange, with make-up slang, meant to poke some well-needed fun at the dismal 1984/Brave New World genre.But just because the Wanting Seed is a work of playful parody and dark comedy does not mean there is nothing profound about it. In fact if I had to pick the one dystopian novel towards which our society is most surely leaning, it would be this one (which is pretty amazing considering it was written in 1962). As counties like China and India are regulating procreation and instituting their own versions of Mr. Burgess' "population police" and the value of human life wilts ever downward, I wonder how close we are to vision of the Wanting Seed. The novel stands as a warning that repressing man's natural urges and diminishing his worth is not the answer to the problem. Your bookstore is stocked full of novels predicting mankind's future, but few as startling and important as this.

The Wanting Seed is the second best book by Burgess, next to Earthly Powers. This is the first novel of his in which he explicitly describes the "Pelagian Theory" which is a cyclical view of society and governments based on the views of Saint Augustine and the heretic Pelagius (note that Pelagius was from the British Isles). This book is essential if you want to read and understand many of Burgess' works, especially A Clockwork Orange, in which his description of the Pelagian Theory is unformed and unfinished.

Though not reading much of Burgess's literature, I rather enjoyed this book. I found myself entailed in the simplicity of a love story which the book is. As complex as the meaning of the book, I focused on the simplicity. The story of ill-fated lovers in a world full of struggle. The over population problem is very plausible which creates a sense of dread. The future at hand in the book could happen. Every time I read it I find something which I overlooked before. The plot moves smoothly enough to want to finish it. Over all it's a delightful book.