A straightforward enough tale, albeit a bit abstruse in the telling.

A young lad, recently kicked out of uni, attempts to idle in the Carribean while waiting for his inheritance to kick in. There is some cover story about the works of a poet that merit investigation, but it fails to convince.

Unforunately, the young lad's secret sister is in the Carribean, and his betters decide the two of them should not be in the same vicinity lest incest occur, something that is apparently a bit of a family trait.


There is a lot of near-insufferable wordplay and riddling in the novel, as such puzzle-solving is the chief way in which the narrator responds to the world. Everything is a puzzle to be solved, every name has hidden meaning, every coincidence part of a hidden pattern. This works well as a character flaw, but Burgess really meant for the novel to be interpreted as a riddle, and wrote an entire essay on how to go about it. Points lost for that bit of over-engineering.

The usual all-knowing, all-powerful organization controlling every move makes an appearance, detracting a bit from the explanation that concludes the novel. Burgess gets some nice digs in at what he considers art favored by young people, but which is really post- or post-post-modern art: arbitrary combinations of unrelated objects whose juxtaposition may be novel or startling, but which is ultimately devoid of any meaning beyond mere surface spectacle. A repeated theme, in a way, from Clockwork Orange: young people are awful, but fortunately they grow out of it. ( )

Got to admire a novel that opens with a student being reprimanded for his public nude sex protest. It took me a while to get into this novel, I found that looking up the numerous references and uncommon words (such as epipsychidionizing) was taking more time than reading the novel, but as it went on, I found the rhythm (about half-way through). I find there is always a slight problem reading well-read authors who assume everyone has had the same educational upbringing as themselves - particularly using references to "the classics" - a subject dropped from general education before my time. I like to feel authors such as John Wilson would have the same hard time relating to alembicated references like Dipsy and Tinky-Winky, or like social media's Meta. However, that is part of the fun of reading. I truly enjoyed the references (very pleased to discover "A Skeleton Key to Finnegan's Wake" from Burgess' passing reference to Henry Morton Robinson). Also references to Electra, Levi-Strauss, Meister Eckhart, Alfred Kazin, Henrik Ibsen's "Ghosts" Borges' "La Forma de la Espada", Lawrence Durrell's "The Revolt of Aphrodite".
The novel was based on an Algonquin Indian legend, similar to the Oedipus story, and Burgess uses many literary tools in the telling. I wonder if Burgess knew of the advertising campaign for the perfume "Caleche" used imagery of sphinxes. Probably.
Burgess continually plays with words and their meanings that only a multilinguistic genius could keep up with (Sanskrit, German, Greek, Maltese, Welsh, Malay etc). He even invents the Castitan language used in the story. He describes the dawn light as eolithic, and rhododactylos (from Homer's description of the goddess of the dawn). When describing a lobby in the story, Burgess created the entire scene made out of the words found on a page of Wilkinson's Malay-English dictionary. This is exactly the sort of reference any Burgess fan would appreciate. When Miles was agitated at sea, he used the insult "oysterballocked poetaster" was reminiscent to Captain Haddock's insults in Tintin. At one point in the novel, it appears that the author has swallowed a nautical dictionary, spurting terms for items found below deck as they are tossed during a storm. The name "Emmett", the protagonist's old nanny (coincidentally the name of the protagonist in another book I read recently), is one of many names related to animals/birds/insects, in keeping with the Algonquin Indian legend I love the style he uses when directly addressing the reader, for example in the sex scene "I know that the reader claims a right to be let in as a voyeur...but I have always been shy of...lambdacizing public activities".
Burgess wrote his own criticism of this book named "Oedipus Wrecks", so I won't say anymore, except I enjoyed this great plot and humorous book. ( )

Entirely in keeping with the mood of this competent novel, when I first entered this title and author, to find this book...the American Library of Congress gave me a list of 48 titles on Paleontology. The LoC doesn't have a copy of this novel apparently. But the novel, which I remember pleasantly, is set on a Caribbean Island during Carnival. Our hero, by the end of the three days it covers, has had several encounters with his doppelganger, and decides he does need some psychiatric help. There are some echoes here of that rather better book, "Under the Volcano" by Malcolm Lowry. The book is an adequate entertainment. ( )

Bizarre (with a small "b") adventure
Miles Faber rebels against the sensible ones around him and embarks on a kind of pilgrimage to a ficticious Caribbean island in search of an obscure artist. When there, his adventure takes all sorts of surreal twists and turns, the major one being coming face to face with his doppelganger who (although being physically identical to him) is his complete opposite when it comes to personality.
M/F is a humorous, fast-paced, bumbling odyssey of a book, full of oddball characters and slightly unbelievable happenings. There's also a load of double meanings hidden throughout the charismatic text, which if it wasn't for the foreword I don't think I would've "got", but I don't think any of that really matters. Entertaining. ( )

Another of Burgess' wonderful escapes into absurdism. Fate met its master when it met Burgess. ( )