The End of the World News by Anthony Burgess
"The End of the World News" by Anthony Burgess is a multifaceted novel that intertwines three largely independent narratives, culminating in a cohesive climax at the end. The primary storyline, set in the winter of 1999, revolves around the discovery of a runaway planet, Lynx, which threatens to collide with Earth at the dawn of the year 2000. This imminent catastrophe leads to a desperate plan by a group of scientists, including Dr. Hubert Frame and his estranged son-in-law, Dr. Valentine Brodie, to escape the disaster aboard a spaceship designed for an elite few.
In addition to the science fiction narrative, the book features a lighthearted yet historically grounded biography of Sigmund Freud, detailing his struggles and contributions to psychoanalysis, alongside a musical portrayal of Leon Trotsky's experiences in New York City during 1917, emphasizing his ideological conflicts and personal dilemmas. The narratives are cleverly linked, particularly through the character of Willett, who serves as a structural connector and a reflection of the cultural tensions of the time.
Burgess's novel is recognized for its intellectual depth and playful language, positioning it within the postmodern literary landscape. Through its exploration of human responses to extraordinary circumstances, "The End of the World News" not only presents a compelling narrative about impending doom but also reflects on broader themes of history, identity, and the human condition.
The End of the World News by Anthony Burgess
First published: 1982
Type of work: Science fiction, biography, and political musical comedy
Time of work: The 1890’s through 1938, 1917, and 1999-2000
Locale: New York City, Vienna, America, Western Europe, and Australia
Principal Characters:
Dr. Valentine Brodie , a science-fiction writer and university lecturer with a compassion for imperfection in human lifeRobert Courtland van Caulaert Willett , a fat actor and companion of Valentine BrodieDr. Sigmund Freud , the subject of a free biographyLev Davidovich Bronstein , also known asLeon Trotsky , a Russian revolutionary turned musical heroDr. Vanessa Brodie , the loyal and perfectionist wife of Valentine BrodieOlga “Mooney” Lunacharskaya , Trotsky’s secretary in New YorkDr. Carl Jung , Freud’s Swiss follower, who turns against him
The Novel
The End of the World News, consists of three largely independent narratives. Apart from some clever verbal and thematical parallels, the three interwoven texts do not come together before the very end of the novel.
The science-fiction story begins in Australia, where, during a Nativity play in the winter of 1999, an amateur astronomer becomes the first ordinary citizen to spot Lynx, “a bloody new star in the bloody east.” In this story, which self-consciously alludes to Rudolph Mate’s 1951 disaster film When Worlds Collide, Lynx is discovered to be a runaway planet from a different solar system about to pass by and then to pulverize Earth on its rebound in the fall (a conscious pun) of the year 2000.
Only a few leading scientists, such as the American Dr. Hubert Frame, are aware of the full extent of the coming global catastrophe. After a discussion with his colleagues and family, in March, 2000, he proposes to the president of a united North America a plan to equip a large spaceship to save fifty members of the nation’s physical and scientific elite by sending them off on a generations-long journey through outer space. Among the future astronauts are his daughter, Dr. Vanessa Brodie, and, at her insistence, her estranged husband, Dr. Valentine Brodie, the only nonelite member of the project. Valentine is arrested, however, with his new pal Robert Courtland van Caulaert Willett outside the bars of Manhattan on the night the other crew members leave for a secret rendezvous in Kansas.
There, while Lynx’s first close bypass wreaks tidal and seismic havoc on an unprotected Earth, the project gets under way. Everybody is placed under the authority of Dr. Paul Maxwell Bartlett (who wears “black surrogate leather”); his dictatorial methods lead to the death of a homesick scientist.
In New York, Valentine and Willett survive a tidal onslaught on the city and participate in the clean-up afterward. Both escape from the metropolis before Earth’s second and fatal encounter with Lynx. After an apocalyptic odyssey through the devastated heartland of America aboard various stolen vehicles, the two friends finally arrive at the launch site in Kansas. Now a final battle for a place aboard the America erupts. Bartlett dies, and Valentine, reconciled with Vanessa, assumes command over the spaceship, which escapes the destruction of Earth and begins its long voyage.
The novel’s second story is a lighthearted but historically accurate biography of Dr. Sigmund Freud, opening with his forced emigration from Vienna to London in 1938. His life and work are narrated in a series of flashbacks, beginning with the violent opposition to Freud’s first publication on the Oedipus complex and his thesis that neuroses have their roots in infantile sexuality.
Recollections follow about Freud’s further early tribulations among the bourgeois Viennese, whose opposition stems from a vile mixture of sexual “obscurantism” and anti-Semitism. Also covered are his scientific discoveries, the slow gathering of followers, and a string of successes which climaxes in his relationship with the Swiss ascetic Dr. Carl Jung and the first psychoanalytical congress in Salzburg. Success, however, brings dissent. Freud’s followers begin to leave or turn against him. This trend is climactically encapsulated in his deteriorating relationship with Jung, whose propagation of a “sex-free” psychoanalysis dedicated to the mystic and collective unconsciousness inevitably puts him in fierce opposition to Freud. The biography ends with Freud slowly dying of a painful cancer of the mouth; finally unable to work, he chooses a morphine overdose in order to end his life gracefully.
Burgess’ “musical,” based on Leon Trotsky’s (historical) stay in New York City, opens with his imminent arrival in January, 1917. Rather than an all-out class struggle or an engagement in the then-European war, the American worker needs, as Trotsky’s secretary, Olga “Mooney” Lunacharskaya, insists, “a job with regular pay./ Peace to earn/ Dollars to burn:/ Peace for the USA.”
Falling in love complicates matters for Trotsky, a hitherto staunch believer in utter materialism, who has insisted that “There’s no mystery/ In physical causality.” Olga leaves him because he is a married man, only to reappear with a warning that his illegal arrest by the Imperial Russians is imminent. At the climax of his story, Trotsky is saved only by the outbreak of the February revolution in Russia. With his son Seryozha, he at last embarks on a ship bound for Petrograd.
It is only at the end of the science-fiction story that all three narratives are formally brought together. Videodiscs containing the Freud play and the Trotsky musical are taken along in the America, where their existence in the ships’ archives is mentioned in the epilogue by the omniscient narrator, who has all along been relating the tale of Earth’s last days to a skeptical audience consisting of the descendants of the early astronauts.
The Characters
Among the more than one hundred characters peopling the pages of The End of the World News, Dr. Valentine Brodie, a renegade university lecturer hungering for imperfection in life and sex, emerges as the novel’s protagonist and its commentator-for, uncannily, Brodie has himself written a science-fiction book about the end of the world, on which he lectures: “This, I think, is what our genre is about-the ways in which ordinary human beings respond to exceptional circumstances imposed unexpectedly upon them.” He is also the character through whose eyes the last months of the world are most intensely and most compassionately observed. His friendship with Willett springs from both men’s love for the richness of language and the nightlife of the city-a life which, nevertheless, they observe inevitably from a detached and intellectual, upper-class angle, even while they take their cherished mudbath in it. It is Willett who salvages the Freud and Trotsky videodiscs, because, as he himself says, “I am on them, though admittedly in rather small parts”-as Freud’s first follower, Dr. Adler, and the “extra” Bokharin.
This clever literary sleight of hand thus makes the two other texts into stories within the science-fiction story of The End of the World News (and thus legitimizes the title). Willett, however, is more than a structural linchpin in the novel. Poetic justice and a harsh rejection of nostalgia are meted out when Willett, who shoots the dictatorial Bartlett during the showdown at the launch site, admits his desire to leave the space-age ark since he believes that his place, as a representative of the culture of the past, “is out there,” on the dying Earth. Valentine and his wife even contemplate burning the two discs Willett has given them as his farewell present.
His designedly fictional use of the historical protagonists of The End of the World News allows Burgess to write about his characters in a rather free and vivid fashion and to present his own interpretation of their life and conflicts. Freud’s flaw, in Burgess’ version of the Freud “myth,” is his insistence on brotherliness and familial harmony; he seems unable to view other people as anything other than friends or foes. This makes him a tragic figure, whom the story links to Oedipus Rex and Moses, both seen as fallen heroes. Like most of even the minor and middle-ranking figures of Burgess’ novel, Leon Trotsky, the third protagonist, undergoes character development and has his moment of insight. Trotsky shares with Freud the dedication of his life to a single cause, and even a belief (which surfaces in the end) in the superior importance of the family. He encounters a crisis of conscience when he witnesses the failure of materialism in America, exacerbated by his irrational love for Olga. The presumed abduction of his son Seryozha brings him to a momentary abdication of pure materialism as the tormented father cries out, “Family’s first.”
Burgess’ superb characterization succeeds in adding a fresh new dimension even to such overly abused stereotypes as the zealous evangelist (Calvin Gropius, who, as the spiritual father of the first baby aboard the America, becomes a sort of ersatz-Joseph or Abraham for the ensuing space-born generation) and the lascivious undergraduate exchanging sex for an A grade (Disney Tamsen, who is given insight into Valentine’s character).
Critical Context
With its many levels of narrative discourse, The End of the World News has a definite place among the most formally self-conscious works of the postmodernist era, which show the influence of the critical thinking of French (post-)structuralism and deconstructionism. Burgess’ aim is not, however, to alienate (the majority of) readers with a circular intellectualism; rather, his novel can be placed in the category of popular works which are also intellectually satisfying, among which Umberto Eco’s Il nome della rosa (1980; The Name of the Rose, 1983) is a prime example.
Well aware of the reader’s familiarity with the global-disaster plot of the frame tale, Burgess’ science-fiction adventure survives on its intellectual wit, which is usually absent in the mass-market field of this genre. Hand in hand with this is verbal inventiveness which has become the author’s trademark ever since his 1962 masterpiece A Clockwork Orange. His fictional use of historical protagonists in The End of the World News has it predecessors most clearly in Burgess’ novel about William Shakespeare, Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare’s Love-Life (1964).
Finally, deriving strength from his previous musical works (his Third Symphony was performed in the United States in 1975), Burgess has told a tale about Trotsky that is a technically convincing “libretto of a musical play” on the generically untypical topic of world socialism.
Bibliography
America. CXLVIII, May 21, 1983, p. 406.
Christian Science Monitor. May 11, 1983, p. 9.
Clark, Jeff. Review in Library Journal. CVIII (February 15, 1983), p. 411.
Commonweal. CX, September 23, 1983, p. 503.
New Statesman. CIV, November 19, 1982, p. 27.
The New Yorker. LIX, April 11, 1983, p. 134.
Publishers Weekly. CCXXIII, January 14, 1983, p. 70.
Reed, J. D. “Dividing Gall into Three Parts,” in Time. CXXI (March 21, 1983), p. 76.
Wilson, A. N. “Faith and Uncertainty: Recent Novels,” in Encounter. LX (February, 1983), p. 65.
Wood, Michael. “A Love Song to What Would Be Lost,” in The New York Times Book Review. March 6, 1983, p. 3.
World Literature Today. LVII, Autumn, 1983, p. 636.