The Right to an Answer by Anthony Burgess

'Never mind who started it.  You've committed the great sin against stability and you see now what a bloody mess you can land into when you do that.'

As followers of my twitter feed--and perhaps several former or current FBI agents--may know, on a recent trip to Wonder Book in Hagerstown, MD, I purchased a Murray Leinster paperback with an adorable title and a great Richard Powers cover, War with the Gizmos, and two additional paperbacks, each by a polymath British genius with some connection to the SF community.  Let's today read one of those, a 1970 Ballantine printing of Anthony Burgess's 1960 novel, The Right to an Answer, which is billed on the covers of my copy as some kind of hilarious comedy and which I am interpreting as a lament about changes in English and world society since the Second World War and a tragic rumination about morality and justice, its primary lenses being the topics of sex and racism.    

The narrator of The Right to an Answer is Denham, the middle-aged son of a printer who has made for himself a successful career travelling the world for an export firm, spending years at a time in Asia and Africa; currently he is head of a big office in Tokyo.  Though a serious man of business, Denham studied English at university and so is conversant with the arts and literature, and there are many references to Shakespeare in the novel.

As The Right to an Answer begins, Denham is returning to England for a few months leave after having been abroad for years, and makes the acquaintance of his retired father's cronies in the suburban pub where they all hang out.  Burgess gives all these characters fun (and mostly sad) little personalities and interconnecting relationships.  One of the novel's multiple themes is how this pub is the center of the community, and its owner-operator the community's true leader and a pillar of its survival; the pub is contrasted with the center of post-war Western life, the TV, which is associated with America and is depicted as an almost impossible-to-resist drug that addicts people and breaks down community, inspiring people to stay at home every night and ignore their neighbors.  Before I moved to New York I watched TV incessantly myself, and after leaving New York I have increasingly found the TV irritating, and so all this talk of television and its baleful effects was interesting to me.  Still, I am considering the main topic of Burgess's novel to be adultery.

Most of the secondary characters in The Right to an Answer, people who are of lower social class than the educated Denham, or, if of similar class status, have failed to accumulate the money Denham has, are engaged in adulterous sexual relationships which Denham feels are immoral.  One of the philosophical topics Burgess addresses in the novel is the question of who, if anybody, has the standing to pass such moral judgements, and it is clear that Denham himself is really in no position to do so: never married himself, he has no grounds to criticize the behavior of married people, and as a customer of prostitutes is himself guilty of violating sexual mores.  Denham has in fact never had sex with an Englishwoman, all his sexual relationships having been while abroad, and it is implied that all of these relationships have been of a sort of exploitative character--in fact, one of the themes of the novel is the disastrous nature of interracial sexual relationships, and, in general, all relations between different ethnic and racial groups.  Burgess in the novel does not portray dealings between the classes in a positive light, either--people who look to Denham for advice and financial support, and they are many, do not fare well.  

The first third or so of the 210 pages of the novel's text are set in England, where (among other characters) Denham meets a printer, Winterbottom, and his strong-willed wife, Alice.  Alice Winterbottom psychologically dominates her weak-willed husband, and he pathetically assents to her vigorous sexual relationships with other men; the weak Winterbottom does not himself have sex with other women.  Another individual Denham meets is a newspaperman who works with Denham's sister, with whom Denham does not get along (another way Denham is depicted as deracinated and alienated from his own people.)  This journalist, Everett, is an almost forgotten poet of the Georgian school, and tries to get Denham to finance the publication of a collection of his poetry--there is no chance such a book will turn a profit, so essentially this is a request for charity, and Denham is reluctant to play the role of patron of the arts.  Everett has a sexy young daughter, Imogen, who returns home to daddy after abandoning her husband, whom she considers a bore.  Imogen, like Alice, is domineering and manipulative, and she takes up with Winterbottom, convincing him to leave Alice and move with her to London.  The weak and naïve Winterbottom falls in love with Imogen, whose feelings for Winterbottom are closer to pity or even contempt.  Without any work, Imogen and Winterbottom join Imogen's father in importuning Denham for financial support for their new London lifestyle and Winterbottom's half-assed effort to start an independent small printing business.  Even if Denham is in no position to criticize these people's marital infidelity and sexual improprieties, his instincts are correct, and they all suffer from their "sins against stability," their destruction of their own and other people's marriages.   

In the middle third of the novel Denham has to go to Ceylon for a month or so to handle some unexpected business, and he runs into a college-educated Ceylonese man, Raj, who introduces himself on the pretext (which we later learn is fabricated) that Denham has the same last name as one of Raj's favorite college professors.  Raj is forward and loquacious and with astonishing rapidity forces his friendship on Denham, so that Denham has yet another person demanding his advice and support, another person who ultimately suffers from Denham's poor guidance.  Raj is headed to England to study for an advanced degree and to do research on race relations, and manipulates events so that he sits next to Denham on the narrator's return flight to Britain; once in Blighty Raj insinuates himself into the elder Denham's circle of friends and acquaintances at that pub.  Raj has various adventures in the suburb inhabited by Denham's father; he is repeatedly assaulted by racists, of example, but, a skilled fighter, triumphs over them.  Raj seeks lodgings, and Denham's father's reluctance to accommodate him--apparently based on racism--is overcome when he tastes Raj's excellent curry--the curry is not only delicious, but cures the old man's persistent cough.  

Denham heads back to Japan and his position there, leaving his room in his father's house to Raj, foolishly thinking that Raj and his father, two men in need of support--the one a foreigner in a sometimes hostile or bewildering land and the other an ailing oldster--will provide beneficial support to each other.  Denham travels to Yokahama as a passenger on a Dutch ship, and Burgess offers us an English view of the Dutch, suggesting the Netherlands is "a jolly nightmare parody of England" and of Japan, where women are so different from the assertive, aggressive and manipulative Alice and Imogen.  Aboard the vessel, he receives numerous postcards from Raj requesting advice--Raj has fallen in love with Alice Winterbottom.

In the final third of the novel the plot accelerates and, for a book advertised as "funny," we get a lot of abuse and death.  Denham's live-in Japanese girlfriend is sexually assaulted by American teenagers, the sons of United States Air Force personnel.  To support herself and Winterbottom, Imogen has taken up a risky bit of thievery, acting the part of a prostitute and accepting payment from her clients and sneaking off before preforming the promised services; she pulls this scam on the wrong guy, and is beaten up, giving occasion for several secondary and minor characters to muse on the nature of justice: some see Imogen's deception as a just punishment of the johns for their indulgence in prostitution, some see Imogen's beating as a just punishment for deceiving and robbing men.  Denham gets word that his father is dying, and flies home on a Scandinavian airline, on a plane on which a French sex symbol and her entourage are also passengers, giving Burgess the chance to caricature the Nordic peoples as he earlier did the Dutch, and to lampoon the artificiality of the world of cinema.  Back in the London suburb he finds his father has died, and that there is reason to suspect that Raj may be in somewise culpable for the old man's demise.  Imogen, missing multiple teeth, has left Winterbottom and moved in with her father, the poet Everett.  Winterbottom returns to his wife Alice, and Raj, perhaps thinking Winterbottom is an intruder, perhaps merely out of jealousy, kills Winterbottom, shooting him by surprise from behind, and then kills himself.  

One of Burgess's themes is the ambiguous and overlapping nature of responsibility and blame, and the black fates of the elder Denham, Winterbottom, and Raj are a good example of this theme--obviously Raj bears responsibility for shooting pathetic Winterbottom, but Winterbottom and Alice's poor choices regarding their marriage and Denham's crummy advice to everybody and his introduction of the alien Raj into the suburban English community set the stage for the cataclysm.

After all this tragedy, there is a deus ex machina sort of ending that rewards the owner of the pub, who has proven himself the true leader of the community throughout the book, and Everett the poet, who represents the world of literature which is sinking beneath the inexorable tide of TV (the untimely death of both the novel's printers symbolizes the peril and decline of literature in the mid-century age of electronics and globalism.)  It is hard not to take "deus ex machina" literally and think that the happy ending for the pub owner and Everett are Burgess's suggestion that only God can accurately judge who is good and deserving of read and who is evil and deserving of punishment.

Despite the happy ending for those two guys, The Right to an Answer is a very tragic book.  Sexual relationships don't work, family relationships don't work, and interactions between different communities are destructive.  It is also a very conservative book which argues that any innovation, anything you might describe as "progress," is a disaster that is going to weaken the community and make life worse.  Technological advance is represented by the American innovations of the atomic bomb which threatens all life and the TV which is destroying the world of print and the English community.  International trade, immigration and increased interactions between different civilizations and nations and races lead to exploitation and violence and the decay of traditional community--American whites rape Japanese women, American TV destroys English neighborliness, British whites assault the Hindu Raj, Raj (who himself is racist against Africans even as he complains of the racism he himself suffers from Britons) comes to England to learn and ends up killing another man and then himself largely because of the advice of Denham.

The Right to an Answer is thus full of interesting and thought-provoking stuff.  But is it fun, is it a good read?  I think it is.  While I only laughed out loud once (when the text incorporated a defamatory newspaper article by Denham's bitter sister and the rejected Everett about Denham), the jokes all actually work and do not irritate or detract from the larger tragic vision.  On the scale of individual sentences and paragraphs there are lots of little clever bits, metaphors and things, like how Burgess compares air travel to an illness, with the flight crew as doctors and the stewardesses as nurses, and how he likens walking through a train station--"past the Station Master and the Telegraph Office and the Restaurant" to walking the Stations of the Cross in a Catholic Church.  On the larger scale of the structure of the novel, Burgess also succeeds, with lots of effective foreshadowing--stuff you learn early on later pays off in satisfying ways.  A good example is the evolution of Raj from a silly and sympathetic character to a dangerous and sinister one--it is totally believable, because Raj himself doesn't really change, just the way we view him--even in his earliest appearances there are hints of the sinister and even in his last moments he is sad and ridiculous, a victim as well as a destroyer; Burgess has not been lying to the reader or tricking him, what happens feels natural and is thus all the more powerful and surprising.  I remember thinking the ends of some of the other Burgess novels I have read, like The Pianoplayers, felt poorly integrated with the rest of the book, but The Right to an Answer doesn't have that problem; all the different parts work together smoothly.

So, thumbs up for The Right to an Answer.  It is a well-crafted novel that, if you are like the peeps at The Washington Star or The New York Review of Books, you will think is hilarious, if you are familiar with Burgess's biography, will present to you all kinds of connections to his own life (for example, Burgess spent years in the East, during which time his wife was raped by American servicemen), and if you are the social history type will offer insight into what an educated and well-travelled Englishman in the 1950s thought of his own country, as well as of the Japanese, Hindus, Americans, Scandinavians and the Dutch.  Worth your time.

Just yesterday at a Pennsylvania antique store I bought a water damaged collection of Burgess short stories, so expect more Burgess here at MPorcius Fiction Log in the future.  But first, a return to the American weird.