Algonquin Legend

By Martha Duffy

MF by Anthony Burgess. 242 pages. Knopf. $5.95.

The epigraph for John Anthony Burgess Wilson's new novel is taken from a stage direction in Much Ado About Nothing: "Enter Prince, Leonato, Claudio and Jacke Wilson." It is appropriate because there is nothing in the field of fiction this Jack Wilson does not do. His prodigious career has already accounted for 15 novels, five books of criticism, hundreds of reviews and essays, all published since 1956, when Burgess was 39.

Though he is one of the nimblest critics alive, it is the novels that really evoke awe. This British Nabokov, out with his literary butterfly net--is there an idea on the wind that he can't ensnare and turn into a jaunty, funny, shocking piece of fiction? There have already been the international spy thriller (Tremor of Intent), the scatological novel (Enderby), the population-explosion novel (The Wanting Seed), the Third World satire (Devil of a State), the historical novel (Nothing Like the Sun), and the futuristic novel (A Clockwork Orange). Now comes MF, the biggest send-up of them all, on Claude Levi-Strauss's intellectually fashionable structural anthropology.

Levi-Strauss's theory is that, appearances notwithstanding, the war-painted Indian and the nuclear physicist are as similar as fraternal twins: the human intellect has been operating in the same fundamental pattern since the dawn of society.

Such notions are the stuff that paradox is made of--true grist for the comic novelist. In MF, Burgess takes off from a Levi-Strauss contention that a universal connection exists between answering conundrums and committing incest. According to this view, it was not by chance that Oedipus' unwitting incest occurred after he solved the riddle of the Sphinx. Among the Algonquin and Iroquois tribes, there is a legend of brother-and-sister love in which riddles are posed by talking owls. In a 1967 essay, Burgess marvels at this transcultural yoking. In MF, the old Algonquin yarn is the mother of one of his richest comic inventions.

The story tells the plight of Miles Faber, a wealthy young pedant who is determined to visit the Caribbean island of Castita in order to discover facts about a totally unsung native poet named Sib Legeru. His innocent search soon plunges him into confrontations with menacing strangers who demand answers to fantastic questions instead of replying to Miles' simple ones. Worse, he learns that not only is he the child of an incestuous union but that he also has both a sister and a double on the island. Murder and mayhem follow with appropriate speed.

Burgess leaves a plethora of clues as to his abstruse purposes--most of them in multilingual hints and guesses. The story starts in Manhattan's Algonquin Hotel. The man who encouraged Miles' interest in Sib Legeru, for instance, is one Professor Keteki--Sanskrit for riddle. While killing time with TV in his hotel room, Miles watches an old movie with Death and Transfiguration (by Richard Strauss) on the sound track.

One could go on and on. The business of the birds asking perilous questions is carried out by making Miles' double's mother a circus performer whose aviary of trained birds includes Iris, Angus, Charles, Pamela, John, Penelope, Brigid, Anthony, Muriel, Mary, Norman, Saul, Philip and Ivy--all named, it would appear, for modern novelists.

Even for readers who have never read Levi-Strauss and think Algonquin legends are about Dorothy Parker, MF still works as a comic novel. It is not Burgess's best book because it is rather too schematic. The effort of dragging his mythic story into the 20th century has left the author with too little chance to flesh out his hero. Burgess is better remembered for characters like Enderby --decent, quirky men weathering the infirmities of the body and the indignities of the soul with awkward gallantry. By contrast, Miles Faber is a disappointment --nutty, knowledgeable, but finally a shadow. Still, the book shows Burgess's comic technique at its most wizardly, and that is enough to make MF one of the season's funnier novels.

It is a well-known story that Anthony Burgess began writing in earnest in 1959, when a doctor in Malaya told him he had a brain tumor and barely a year to live. In order to leave his ailing wife some kind of security, he returned to England and wrote five novels in one year. There was no tumor, but even after he heard the good news, Burgess never stopped working--or moving around. Disgusted by high taxes and public indifference, he left London after his wife died, continued his hectic pace in Malta, Rome, and this year Princeton.

Burgess originally planned to be a composer. He is now halfway through writing music and lyrics for a musical version of Ulysses. He could not resist, either, printing in MF the music Miles hears in Castita--the same tune, successively done as a ballad, an anthem and a wedding march. He has completed two movie scripts and is itching to get behind a camera. "So much to learn," he mutters dejectedly, but he is investing in movie-tape equipment, and heaven knows who or what will be shot on the playing fields of Princeton.

Surprisingly, Princeton has not proved a congenial place to work. Students are slothful and in search of a father figure, he says. Parents are#151;well--parental. (One frantic couple from Detroit beseeched Burgess to convince their son that he must relinquish his dream of becoming a poet and join the family business.) Burgess and his new young wife, a linguist named Liana, sublet sight unseen a tiny faculty apartment from a large Chinese family, which left them a vast quantity of chopsticks but no flatware--and little place to write.

Also, Burgess loathes snow. "It petrifies me," he complains. "It's un-alive, the negation of everything.

I'll take rain every day of the year if I can just have a little green."

Snow or not, room or not, Burgess tries to write at least 1,000 words a day. His deepest regret is that he is already 54; he has at least 20 ideas for novels. Among them is a story about a Maugham-like novelist writing a book about a wicked Pope who ruined the church. The wicked Pope is, of all people, John XXIII. Burgess, who comes of a North England family that has been Catholic for centuries, regards John as a historic disaster. An outspoken anti-ecumenist, he thinks John's popularizing destroyed "the intellectual integrity and dignity of the church."

Like many novelists, Burgess keeps tabs on his colleagues. Unlike many of them, he is notably generous in his judgments. He admits to wishing that he had written Portnoy's Complaint and almost everything of Nabokov's. He dotes on Peter De Vries and finds Updike and Vidal "elegant" writers.

Next year he will probably live in Bracciano, outside Rome. But there are offers from several U.S. universities and an invitation to Japan in the fall. He frankly revels in the attention. There have been too many years when his books were such frequent flops that his publishers made him adopt a pen name. What he really seems to be seeking is the ideal retreat in which to write those 20 books still in his head. It might yet be found in the green and rainy climate he left. . Martha Duffy

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