A large, ambitious novel narrated by Kenneth Toomey, an elderly, openly homosexual English writer looking back on his long career. Over a life that crosses much of the twentieth century, he meets famous figures and watches the great events of the age. A friendship with a Catholic priest draws him into questions about the Church, miracles, good and evil. The book is comic, learned and sprawling, and many readers regard it as Burgess's masterpiece.
Quotes
It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.
I lay a little while, naked, mottled, sallow, emaciated, smoking a cigarette that should have been postcoital but was not.
...To the mother hubbard girl, whose name seemed to be Janie: ‘It becomes you, it does really, that chunk of filthy butter muslin, but then you’re the sort of girl who could get away with anything, even having one tit bigger than the other.’ He did a comic oenophil act with the bottle of Marsovin...