99. The Worm and the Ring by Anthony Burgess

The title of this 1961 novel by Burgess (the author of A Clockwork Orange, Earthly Powers, etc) is rather odd. There is little mention in the book of either worms or rings, and the plot, set in a grammar school (Burgess was for several years a schoolteacher at Banbury near Oxford), is about the theft of a diary. Then one realizes — or is told by some kindly person — that the whole book is in fact a re-telling, on one level, of the Wagnerian ring cycle.

It opens with Albert Rich (Alberich in the ring cycle, a dwarf) a schoolboy, pursuing some giggling schoolgirls (three Rhine-maidens), then introduces the headmaster Woolton (Wotan, the chief of the Gods) and his wife Frederica (Fricka, the consort of Wotan); there is another character called Lodge (Loge, or Loki, god of fire), a girl called Linda (Woglinde, one of the Rhine-maidens), and a pub called ‘the Dragon’ (‘worm’ being an archaic word for dragon). The stolen diary stands in for the stolen ring.

It’s all very interesting, and makes one wonder whether all novelists shouldn’t be weaving a rich vein of arcane symbolism into their work, accessible only to the initiated. Burgess certainly thought so, at least in this early period (The Worm and the Ring was only his second foray into the novel, completed around 1954, though not published until later). He had a particular taste for mirroring musical plots: his Napoleon Symphony was a later attempt to re-cast Beethoven’s Eroica symphony as a novel. He commented about the whole business that novel-writing was in a sense too easy: the composer had to write a score weaving together the contributions of dozens of instrumentalists: why should the novelist be let off the hook?

In a symphony many strands conjoined, in the same instant, to make a statement; in a novel all you had was a single line of monody. The ease with which dialogue could be written seemed grossly unfair. This was not art as I had known it. It seemed cheating not to be able to give the reader chords and counterpoint. It was like pretending that there could be such a thing as a concerto for unaccompanied flute. My notion of giving the reader his money’s worth was to throw difficult words and neologisms at him, to make the syntax involuted. Anything, in fact, to give the impression of a musicalisation of prose. I saw that that was what Joyce had really been trying to do in Finnegans Wake — clotting words into chords, presenting several stories simultaneously in an effect of counterpoint. I was not trying to emulate Finnegans Wake — which had closed gates rather than opened them — but I felt that Ulysses had still plenty to teach to a musician who was turning to fiction.

Consulted:
Burgess, Anthony: Little Wilson and Big God (1987)
Biswell, Andrew: The Real Life of Anthony Burgess‎ (2006)