One asks oneself where are the readers both clever and humorous enough to appreciate his learned lightness? I only hope they are legion. He has so assimilated history, languages, literature that they spin from his pen like sugar candy castles. Where a Pynchon or a Bellow or even - God forgive me - an Eco would be ponderous about his learning, Burgess has the lightest of light hands. And all this is accomplished with such sprezzatura - that lovely Italian word for the art of making the difficult look easy. As he did in his extraordinary novel of Shakespeare's love-life, Nothing Like the Sun, Burgess here revivifies no less an enigmatic character than Attila the Hun and gives him his full humanity. I know of no writer better able to recreate the past and make it live, no writer better able to raise literary history from the dead and make it breathe. Burgess takes history and makes it dance, sing and comment upon itself ironically. Every one is richer in wit, irony, history, learning and breathtaking prose than nine novels by nine of our most overrated contemporary novelists. It is hardly necessary to offer a precis of each tale.
Other stories include a delicious retelling of "Der Rosenkavalier," a Sherlock Holmes musical mystery, an account of how Attila the Hun brings down the Roman empire for the unrequited love of a Roman temptress, and a mischievous and sharp meditation on adultery ("The Wine of the Country"). Here are nine quintessentially Burgessian tales: one in which Shakespeare meets his contemporary Cervantes another in which Debussy meets Browning and one in which Hamlet, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern appear as students of necromancy in Wittenberg (and miss the main event of the raising from the dead of Helen of Troy because they must hurriedly return to Denmark). $18.95 THE DEVIL'S MODE is Anthony Burgess at his best - which is so good as to make mere mortals like myself limp with envy and admiration. THE DEVIL'S MODE By Anthony Burgess Random House.
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