Novelising the life of a public figure is never an easy task. And when that figure is Anthony Burgess, well, that’s another story. The Burgess name has become inseparable from A Clockwork Orange or, perhaps more accurately, from Stanley Kubrick’s dark and boisterous adaptation of the novel. Unsurprisingly, there is an entire life – lives, even – aside from A Clockwork Orange and it is these less well-known sides to Burgess that Sean Gregory explores in his debut novel.
In Three Graves we meet the many incarnations of John Anthony Burgess Wilson, travel from Manchester to Malaysia, from Los Angeles to London, all in a rather constant flurry of books, wives, women and wine. “We’ve reserved three graves for you, Mr Burgess. One for your body, one for your books and one for your ego.”
No matter which iteration of himself he goes by, Burgess remains the same man at heart: a self-obsessed boozehound with little loyalty to anything or anyone. As such, his life meanders and sprawls, his relationships with women are fraught and intense, and his career is never quite as he would like it.
Despite making a living from writing, Burgess saw himself as a composer first and author second. Where the book explores this conflicting sense of self is interesting. Gregory’s Burgess bristles with dissatisfaction for himself, which picks away at his otherwise self-assured attitude. This contrasts well with the calm the character finds in composing, his musical fluency adding a vibrancy to his interactions with his environment as he walks through the rain-soaked Manchester streets and identifies the exact note of a church bell chiming.
In showing a more expansive and humanising perspective to a man whose own story and broader body of work are often overshadowed by his biggest hit, Gregory casts his net too wide. In trying to do so much in this novel, the author creates an impossible task and wanders slightly astray from the kernel of the story. There is little room for this debut author to exert his own voice, his own style, over the tedium of Burgess.
Still, there are moments when Gregory’s writing style peeks out from under the Burgess shroud. It’s here you eagerly want him to continue, to push his belligerent protagonist aside and take control.
