Tremor of Intent by Anthony Burgess

First published: 1966

Type of work: Espionage allegory

Time of work: The mid-1960’s, with flashbacks to the 1940’s

Locale: Bradcaster, London, aboard the Polyolbion, Yarylyuk, Istanbul, and Dublin

Principal Characters:

• Denls Hillier, a secret agent who is on his last assignment
• Edwln Roper, Hillier’s boyhood friend, a defected rocket-fuels scientist
• Mr. Theodorescu, a gluttonous buyer and seller of information
• Miss Devi, Theodorescu’s alluring and mysterious companion
• Richard “Ricky” Wriste, a garrulous, ingratiating steward on the Polyolbion
• Alan Walters, a frighteningly precocious teenager
• Clara Walters, Alan’s sister, a devotee of sex manuals

The Novel

Tremor of Intent is ostensibly a spy thriller containing most of the conventional characters and devices of the type, often taken to comic extremes. Yet Anthony Burgess’ American subtitle is “An Eschatological Spy Novel,” and this theological concern with death, Hell, judgment, and the fate of the soul moves the novel beyond its generic features into emphatic Christian allegory.

British agent Denis Hillier is aboard the Polyolbion on a gastronomic cruise to Yarylyuk in the Crimea, where he is to force or persuade the defector Edwin Roper to return to Great Britain. Hillier creates a lengthy unwritten letter to his director, recapitulating his relationship with Roper as Catholic schoolboys and in early manhood, detailing his prior rescue of Roper from his whorish German wife, Brigitte. In quick order, Hillier encounters the ingratiating steward Richard “Ricky” Wriste; the sultry Indian beauty Miss Devi; her employer, the pederastic and gluttonous Mr. Theodorescu; the blonde and innocently perverse Clara Walters; and her frighteningly knowing brother, Alan. Hillier’s cover (he is posing as a typewriter technician) is penetrated by Alan and by Theodorescu, who bests him in an epic eating contest and, after Hillier’s exotic sexual engagement with Miss Devi, elicits secret information from him.

After the departure of Theodorescu and Miss Devi from the Polyolbion, Hillier’s sexual and paternal attraction to Clara escalates, and he considers his rededication to a more spiritualized life. As the Walters children’s father is dying as a result of overindulgence encouraged by their lubricious stepmother, Hillier enlists them in his plan to disembark at Yarylyuk, where Roper is attending a conference: Clara’s acting the wanton allows him to secure a disguise as a Russian officer and access to Roper. The scientist is stubbornly dedicated to the memory of a martyred Elizabethan ancestor, however, and Hillier’s appeal is further undermined with the appearance of the loquacious Ricky, who reveals himself as an agent of Panleth, an extermination bureau, and as the prospective assassin of both men. Ricky is shot by Alan, and Roper and Hillier part amicably. Hillier’s reading of an autobiographical chapter by Roper explains Brigitte’s involvement with East German agents and a Member of Parliament who eventually engineered Roper’s supposed defection.

Back aboard the Polyolbion, Hillier reverently initiates Clara into real sexuality; later, he seeks out Theodorescu in Istanbul, where he divulges all of his espionage secrets and leads the surfeited man to a drugged death in the harbor. Five years later, he meets Clara and Alan in Dublin by arrangement, now as a priest concerned with the grander game of spiritual contest, which his last assignment has blatantly suggested throughout the novel.

The Characters

Though Denis Hillier identifies himself as “a void, a dark sack crammed with skills,” his long-imagined letter demonstrates his youthful concern with free will, guilt, and evil, which continue to preoccupy him in his adult life and which lead to his (and Burgess’) central determination of life as “a bloody Manichean mess.” He sometimes employs religious terms for relatively mundane circumstances, but with increasing seriousness as the novel develops. His story is literally a pilgrim’s progress. He is branded, like Cain, from an earlier encounter, is leadingly described as “fallen Adam,” and on the Polyolbion drinks Old Mortality: Such associations are pointed.

When Hillier instructs Alan and Clara about his function as their father is dying, he also observes that “ultimate reality is a dualism or game for two players,” a contest between good and evil of which his agent’s activities are but a shadow: The old demarcations are blurred in contemporary life. Yet, sustained by a beatific and nearly sacramental concept of Clara, he also recognizes that “he was creaking towards a regeneration,” toward “that blessed world beyond politics” and the rituals of the espionage game. After Clara, he craves tenderness.

Hillier’s derogatory annotation of Roper’s memoir is part of his post-Yarylyuk determination to end his impostures and identify neutrality as evil, as residing “in the uncovenanted powers.” His three days’ wait for Theodorescu in Istanbul is his symbolic time in Hell before his resurrection. His heroic self-denial and self-purification before becoming a priest under a regimen of “work, discipline, obedience” complete his respiritualization, so that he can ultimately clarify good and evil to the grown Alan and Clara as “God and Notgod. Salvation and damnation of equal dignity, the two sides of the coin of ultimate reality,” and confidently claim that “the real war goes on in heaven.”

Edwin Roper has apparently defected from a profound but quixotic disillusionment with Great Britain, and his idealism and naivete are frequently assailed by Hillier. As a Catholic schoolboy Roper argued for a unified universe and the scientific approach to life; Hillier instead saw him becoming a thing, “a highly efficient artefact crammed with non-human knowledge.” This state precipitates his subsequent blindness to the emotional life and irrationality, his various intellectual substitutes for religious faith, such as socialism, and the ease with which Brigitte schools him in postbellum guilt. Roper is a split man, torn between rationalism and sentimentality, spirit and body—the Manichaean division of life which so plagues Hillier. When Roper meets Hillier in Yarylyuk, he cites his martyred Catholic forebear to justify his continued resistance to repatriation, but Hillier discovers the man to have been a Protestant victim. Roper’s longtime belief “that life can be better and man nobler,” and his wish to stand outside history, is as misguided as many of his contrary actions in life.

Theodorescu is an attractive and engaging villain, genial, gentlemanly, and unscrupulous, a citizen of the world, a man with a seemingly godlike command of his existence and a delightfully elaborate manner of expression. He is the figurative priest to Hillier’s confession of his accumulated secrets, the glutton overfed. Yet under the influence of Hillier’s drug he reveals a deepseated British public school paranoia to complement his pederastic adulthood.

Alan Walters is superficially a sophisticated boy, but his cleverness and cynicism are a veneer. His nausea after killing Ricky is his real baptism: “He tried to throw up the modern world.” His bitterness over his loose stepmother is translated into his sometimes repellent manner. Yet he recognizes in Hillier’s confidential admission of his role that “everything he’s told us is religious,” and he shoots Ricky as a “neutral,” a concept which Hillier later identifies as a human being reduced to thingness, “a machine rather than a puppet-stage for the enactment of the big fight against good, or against evil.” With his initiation into Hillier’s world of spies, Alan matures rapidly, accusing Hillier and his kind of being romantic games-players and dropping his adult imposture. His later decision to pursue medieval studies, not opting out of history into mockeries of reality, is a significant measure of his growth.

Ricky Wriste is a snoop and a hypocritical purveyor of shipboard nastiness who is unabashed about promoting his own gratuities. Not unlike Theodorescu, he knows infinitely more about any situation than does Hillier. It is appropriate that, confronting Roper and Hillier, he sports brilliant false teeth and an uncharacteristic cultivated voice. Complementing the novel’s religious thrust, he sees himself as “an angel—of death”; reflecting that “our aseptic rational world does not have to be a mirror of ultimate reality,” he permits Hillier an act of contrition. Ironically, it is he, the double, who tells Hillier that his assignment was intended by his masters to be terminal.

Clara Walters is Hillier’s angelic vision, though paradoxically a voracious reader of sex books. She is his temptation in both flesh and spirit, with “archangels guarding her terrible innocence,” and her dead father allows him a serious paternal role. His associations with her are sentimentally and religiously elevated; it is a corruption of her nature that she playacts the whore to ensure his escape from the Polyolbion. His sexual initiation of her is reverent, though she becomes the aggressor. Like Alan, she becomes a balanced individual when she later reencounters Father Hillier.

Miss Devi is Clara’s complete opposite, a dark and vastly experienced temptress. She has a role in the novel’s theological design: She discusses predestination and God’s will with Hillier when they dance, her opinion that “the universe is one thing” reminds him unhappily of Roper, and her body is “a beneficent hell” for him—another reminder of the Manichaean disunity the novel pursues so rigorously.

Critical Context

Tremor of Intent is an outstanding example of Burgess’ prolific inventiveness in a variety of fictional forms. It does not have the epic range of his later novels such as Earthly Powers (1980) or the relative containment of entertainments such as The Doctor Is Sick (1960). Tremor of Intent, which many critics consider his most balanced novel, has never earned the almost prophetic status or popularity of A Clockwork Orange (1962). Yet what is a virtual parody of the espionage genre proves a singularly apt vehicle for Burgess’ exploration of the nature of good and evil and the growth of an eccentric or disharmonious personality, an antihero, into some form of relative sainthood.

Burgess is fundamentally a religious writer, and Tremor of Intent is an unambiguous statement of his persistent view of the Manichaean duality of existence, a composition of opposites. The novel also furthers his characteristic treatment of language as a sophisticated game and of fiction as a hugely resourceful medium; it testifies to Burgess’ considerable wit, his variousness, and his stylishness. He is, here and elsewhere, the conscious literary artist.

Bibliography

Aggeler, Geoffrey. Anthony Burgess: The Artist as Novelist, 1979.

Aggeler, Geoffrey. Critical Essays on Anthony Burgess, 1986.

Coale, Samuel. Anthony Burgess, 1981.

DeVitis, A. A. Anthony Burgess, 1972.

Morris, Robert K. The Consolations of Ambiguity: An Essay on the Novels of Anthony Burgess, 1971.