How could I resist not reading this one. Having read How music Works and MF, this seemed like the perfect next book. Written in rhyming verse, this novel is the fictional biography of a composer and his twin sons Tim and Tom. From a proposed television series on John Calvin's life to Muslims taking offense at Dante's writings, this novel is rich in humour
"'Art,' he pronounced, 'misleads the human soul.
Art.' (Bitter capsule bitten by mistake.)
'It devastates all spiritual control.
Pernicious doctrine - Art' (gulp) 'for art's sake.
It led your Oscar Wilde to condign hell.
We want no art. We want the thing done well.'"
mixed with terrorism, and the hard to swallow subject of cancer;
"'How is it?' Tim enquired as they both got
Into the motoscafo rocking rocking
'Oh, the androblastomas and God knows what.
The elevation of the plasma - shocking.
There's seminomas, teratomas blocking
The seminiferous ducts. The Leyding cell
Or the Sertoli call or something." Mocking,.."
Tim swaps places with his brother Tom to cover his job while he has an operation and meets Tom's girlfriend, a lapsed member of
"...'CHAOS - an acronym - Consortium
For Hastening the Annihilation of
Organised Soc -''All in the name of love", who regrets her recruitment having lost a hand for the cause.
Oh and Tom, after his operation discovered "Paradise regained."
Burgess uses references to Homer, Joyce, Shelley, Byron, Spencer. I noticed also reoccurring words (poetaster, and more). Overall a great feat in literary ability. Burgess used his skills (possibly trademark), in occasionally addressing the reader directly.
It was obvious that Burgess liked James Joyce as much as he disliked Grahame Greene "overlauded trash by Graham Greene", and this novel pays homage, via a musical stage rendition of the Time Machine, to H G Wells.
Burgess is a true wordsmith. ( )

Published in 1993, Byrne, the poetic obituary of the musician, composer, painter, and prolific progenitor, Michael Byrne, is also Burgess's prescient obituary of the 20th Century, and perhaps his own -- it was his last book.

Reviewers of the book point out the autobiographical elements, but as a reader, not particularly familiar with Burgess's life, what struck me about the poem was the embodiment of the furious race of artistic ideas, political ideologies and conflicts, and the decline of Europe throughout the 20th Century.

As a cultural touchstone, the book is wickedly entertaining whether or not the reader agrees with all of Burgess's assessments of his artistic contemporaries. He dismisses James Joyce -- "There was a Joyce (the ignorant said James)", viciously parodies Marlene Dietrich as a German film diva -- "But it was she who bit, bit till men bled" and Erica Jong as the American writer Rayne Waters whose influence on a young girl is described:

That girl had been much moved by Mistress Waters,
Whose novels answered Freud's frustrated whine
About what women wanted. All Eve's daughters
Now knew what women wanted -- to decline
Sex as pure thrust. Sex they must redefine
As clitoral ecstasy, best with a vibrator,
Neck of a bottle of expensive wine,
Even a male as slavish excitator,
Cooly and fully used, coldly discarded later.

The poem is divided into five sections. Four written in ottava rima stanzas (eight lines of iambic pentameter rhyming ababababcc) and one in Spenserian stanzas (9 lines of iambic hexameter rhyming ababbcbcc). The rhythm and rhyme are rollicking and contemporary and carry the poem forward quickly. I read it through the first time for the story, and the second to more thoroughly orient myself in the ambience of the characters and locales.

The first section details the life of Michael Byrne, born in 1900 in Liverpool to fugitives from the Irish famine. Talented as a musician and one "who loved mendacity" and the female sex, he flees from one city to another leaving behind expectant mothers. Landing in London, he is taken up by the aristocratic bohemian set in the 1920s, marries a film cosmetician and sires twin sons, is seduced by the German film diva and spends the 1930s in Hitler's Germany, flees to Switzerland in the 1940s where he bigamously marries again and begins to paint horrific erotic visions, and continues his journeys to Asia and Africa until the narrator finally loses sight of him.

And who is the narrator? A journalist hired by Byrnes to write his obituary in verse:

Somebody had to do it. Blasted Byrne
Pulled out a bunch of dollars from his pocket
Escudos, francs and dirhams. 'Let them learn
If they've a speck of talent not to mock it
But plant it and expect a slow return.
I whizzed mine skywards like a bloody rocket.
Tell what they call a cautionary tale.
Here's on the nail. Expect more in the mail.'

The obituarist (?) never got any more cash in the mail, but continued because of an obsessive fascination for Byrne and a lurking suspicion that s/he might be one of his myriad of children. When the trail for Byrne is lost, the narrator turns to his children.

The second section makes Timothy Byrne, one of Michael's legal heirs, and twin to Thomas, the protagonist. We're now in the mid to late 1980s; Tim, a Catholic priest, is contemplating resigning from the priesthood. He visits his half-sister, Dorothy, who is obsessed with videos chronicling the horrors of late 20th c. violence Together they attend a performance of a musical version of The Time Machine composed by another half-sibling.

The third section takes us to Venice where Tim is presenting a paper advocating an adoption of a neo-Latinate language for the European Union. As he addresses the conference, Tom who is scheduled to undergo an operation to remove a prostate tumor, collapses with an appendectomy. In this chapter, Burgess adopts the Spenserian stanza -- mostly, I think, to underline the ancient, decayed aspect of the Venetian state.

In the fourth section, Tim takes on the persona of the ailing Tom to facilitate an exhibition in Strasbourg that Tom had arranged of European intellectual leaders. One, in particular, inflames an extreme Islamist attack.

Michael Byrne, in the fifth section, rears his ancient existence and summons all his prodigy to a reading of his last will and testament at Claridge's on December 25. Mayhem ensues.

Byrne is a wild ride through 20th century European cultural history -- gossipy, informative and intellectually insightful. ( )