They live in a council house, eat fish fingers and beans on toast, watch the TV. At the beginning Jane is working in a supermarket and her young husband Howard in a garage. It’s this lobster-being-slowly-boiled-and-not-minding quality that is the books’ great achievement, I think. It’s made trickier to do this than it might otherwise have been, I think, by the need to have Janet enact a series of increasingly extreme amoralities as the story proceeds, matching this to her blithely ingenuous (or apparently ingenuous) normalcy of middle-English decency and ordinariness.Īt any rate, Janet tells a story whose surface plainness and attention to the banalities of life is, subtly, warped in the telling until the ordinary has become profoundly nihilistic and strange, almost without the reader noticing the transition. My sense is that Burgess pretty much manages this. Since so much of the effectiveness of the novel rides on Janet’s voice, the trick is in steering a path between believable reproduction of a deliberate class (and gender) simpleness on the one hand, and tacitly sneering condescension on the other. Wikipedia asserts that 'the entire vocabulary in One Hand Clapping amounts to approximately 800 words', which datum isn't sourced, but which feels about right. The effect, indeed, is rather Simenon-ish. just gone twenty-three') is a bright but under-educated working-class woman from the Midlands, Burgess is denied the arcane vocabularising and erudite cultural allusions that are so characteristically him. ![]() More, since that narrator ('Janet Shirley, née Barnes. For example it has a female first-person narrator, something AB only did on one other occasion in his entire career. It is a good book, too, although it reads like a rather unBurgess-y work. They didn’t get as many reviews as they should have got and so on, and now that the true identity of the author comes out its too late to do anything with them, or with One Hand Clapping, anyway, which is not a bad book. The two Joseph Kell books didn’t do too terribly well. Ingersoll's Conversations with Anthony Burgess he complains: 'it’s stupid, you see, because if you invent a new author it means you have to start promoting a new author, instead of using an author you’ve already got, and this is bad publishing. In the event this strategy backfired, the novel 'sank like a stone' and Burgess angrily renamed his publisher 'William Hangman' in private. ![]() William Heinemann had half a dozen to put out all at once, after all. It's not hard to see how a nom de plume derived from the Book of Kells would appeal to a pun-drunk bibliophile like AB, although the decision to use it in the first place seems to have been the publisher's, anxious at over-saturating the market with Burgesstomes. One Hand Clapping was originally published under Burgess's metapseudonym (or whatever the term is for a pseudonym of a pseudonym) 'Joseph Kell'.
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