Shelfies #46: Adam Roberts

The ‘Shelfie’ brief is “focus on one shelf (not the whole case or wall)” so please disregard the bottom three shelves in this image—the two blocks of black-spined Library of America volumes, which I love and in which I read and reread Philip K Dick, Henry James, Nabokov and others (there are several other shelves occupied with black-spined Library of America volumes out of shot, and one anomaly: I saw on eBay a Henry James volume I didn’t have in LoA format, and bought it, and when it arrived it was lacking its dust-jacket. Oh no! Rather than shelve this with the other Jameses, and break up the gorgeous uniform blackness with its pale-brown spine, I have banished it to a different shelf altogether. This is perfectly normal and defensible behaviour on my part, I can assure you)—and disregard also the second shelf down, which holds seventeen volumes, about half a complete set, of the Princeton University Press/Bollingen edition of the complete works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge—that shelf also houses the edition of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria that I made for Edinburgh University Press. Those three shelves are invisible to you.

Look instead at the top shelf.

This is my Burgess shelf—I was going to insert a convoluted and hard-to-follow joke about the Burgess Shale here, but decided against it—containing the complete works of Anthony Burgess, real-name John Wilson (1917-1993). He is known today to most, if he is known at all, as the author of A Clockwork Orange (1962)—a fine novella, but famous more as the inspiration for Kubrick’s 1971 movie than for its own sake. Burgess wrote it, and four other novels, in short order at the start of the 1960s: he believed he was dying, and wanted to provide for his widow—an amazing burst of focused creativity that produced A Clockwork Orange, the superb domestic thriller One Hand Clapping (1961), the SF novel The Wanting Seed (1962)—Harry Harrison ripped this novel off for Make Room! Make Room! (filmed as Soylent Green) and the brilliantly funny Inside Mr. Enderby (1963). But he wasn’t dying, and was able to keep writing throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

Good though A Clockwork Orange is, it is not in the same league as Napoleon Symphony (1974), in which Napoleon’s career is rendered with extraordinary stylistic panache and vividness in a novel that models itself formally on Beethoven’s Eroica symphony: a brilliant experiment in matching verbal with musical art. Or Earthly Powers (1980), a literary blockbuster encompassing through the life of its narrator, gay novelist Kenneth Toomey, the whole of the twentieth-century.

I love Burgess, and reread him often. And there’s a reason I have the complete set of his novels, all on one shelf. Back in the mid 20-teens, before lockdown, I learned that Burgess had started, but had not completed, a novel called The Black Prince, a historical fiction set in the Hundred Years War—written, he claimed, in the style of US experimental Modernist writer John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy. Burgess did not finish this novel, although he did write a screenplay (which was never made into a movie).

Liaising with the Anthony Burgess Centre in Manchester, and the Burgess estate, I got hold of this screenplay and used it as a starting point to write The Black Prince—in the style of Anthony Burgess in the style of Dos Passos—to finish the unfinished project. Prior to starting the writing, I went through AB's complete oeuvre, 33 novels and various other things, to get myself into a properly saturated Burgessy mind-place: rereading the books of his I had, buying online those titles I didn't and reading them, doing the whole lot in order. So now I have a complete set. 

You can see The Black Prince on that top shelf there, with the white red and black spine. I’m quite proud of it, its mad admixture of techno-Modernism and medieval history, of Burgessian stylistic vigour and language-love and ultraviolent battle scenes. But most of all I’m chuffed that there exists in the world a book where my name and Anthony Burgess’s name share the title page.

Adam Roberts is a British writer and academic. His completion of Anthony Burgess’s The Black Prince (2018) is published by UnBound. His most recent novel is Lake of Darkness (Gollancz 2024)

Shelfies is edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin.
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