Any Old Iron [Hardcover]

Anthony Burgess (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 4, 1989

1989 1st Ed. Random House

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Few novelists writing today have the range and erudition of Burgess; and = when, as in Earthly Powers , he gets hold of a subject in which his own powers can be brought into full play, the result is dazzling. Any Old Iron (the title is a word play on King Arthur's sword, which has a symbolic role in the proceedings, and on the name of a derisive British music hall song) is another bravura performance, marred only by a few eccentricities. The very start of the novel, for one thing, is heavy going, Burgess at his most pedantic; and it is only with the sinking of the Titanic , which blessedly supervenes, that a narrative takes hold. Then the book develops like one of those dread "multi-generational sagas," but done almost in shorthand, such is the speed and vigor with which 50 years are traversed, following the lives of two familiesone Russian-Welsh, one Jewish from WW I through the founding of Israel. War from the profane viewpoint of the ordinary British soldier has never been better conveyed than in a dozen scenes here, and there are other passages, like the machinations that follow the killing of a German by a British sergeant in neutral wartime Spain, that are social comedy of the highest order. The characters, including old David Jones, his Russian wife Ludmilla and their children Reg, Beatrix and Dan, are wonderful creations, and if the Jewish group is less interesting it's because the first-person narrator of their story remains a rather shadowy figure. The leitmotif of Arthur's sword, woven into the lives of all of them, and also into some prolonged debates about Welsh nationalism, often seems a touch mechanical, and the book's ending is oddly unresolved. But these are minor flaws in a novel that is for the most part breathlessly readable, touching and funny by turns, and which passes much of the history of this dreadful century in finely sardonic review. BOMC alternate.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Narrated by an English Jew whose intellectual and amorous misadventures crisscross those of three bizarre children of a Welsh father and a Russian mother, the story--from the sinking of the Titanic to the founding of Israel--is a melange of fact and fiction, often outrageously broad and comic. But a substratum of anguish is also evident. Love endures but rarely satisfies. Strife, violence, and rebellion abound: British prisoners die escaping; Russian DPs fail to avoid repatriation; Welsh nationalists initiate a futile uprising. Suggesting that we seek peace and love through forgetting and forgiving, Burgess lacquers his "message" with a vaguely mythic overlay that focuses on King Arthur's sword but fails to signify definitively. Readers should nevertheless enjoy Burgess's wondrous energy and imagination. His scenes are ever vibrant, his personages memorable.
- Arthur Waldhorn, City Coll., CUNY
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 360 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1st edition (February 4, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394574842
• ISBN-13: 978-0394574844
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,554,865 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Anthony Burgess (25th February 1917-22nd November 1993) was one of the UK's leading academics and most respected literary figures. A prolific author, during his writing career Burgess found success as a novelist, critic, composer, playwright, screenwriter, travel writer, essayist, poet and librettist, as well as working as a translator, broadcaster, linguist and educationalist. His fiction also includes NOTHING LIKE THE SUN, a recreation of Shakespeare's love-life, but he is perhaps most famous for the complex and controversial novel A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, exploring the nature of evil. Born in Manchester, he spent time living in Southeast Asia, the USA and Mediterranean Europe as well as in England, until his death in 1993.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Burgess does what he does best - sly legends in prose!, May 8, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Any Old Iron (Mass Market Paperback)

In "Any Old Iron" Burgess gives us an entertaining tale of a Russo-Welsh family across the decades since the late 1800s. The story is ostensibly about families, war, love, birth and death - the usual fare, in other words. He also, being Burgess, gives us a liberal dose of foreign language, word play and (as a subtext that had me re-reading this book a number of times) a carefully camouflaged and delightfully off-kilter retelling of the Arthurian legend. This book is worth reading if only to see if you can tell which character was the "Fisher King" and which others correspond to legend - a marvellous romp through the legendary and the prosaic. Add in Burgess' sly wit and taste for word play and you have a story to settle down with for any number of evenings. I'm sorry Burgess is gone - we shan't see his like again for a long, long time!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Gladius In Extremis, May 8, 2008

By 

Daniel Myers (Greenville, SC USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Any Old Iron (Mass Market Paperback)

This book is about Welsh (excuse me, Cymric) nationalism, and King Arthur's legendary sword Excalibur, sort of, well, maybe, superficially that is, since, as explained in the first chapter, steel corrodes too fast for the sword to have remained in existence all these centuries if it ever did, exist that is, though the theoretical possibility of its wooden scabbard still existing, if it ever did, and was, in fact, wooden, and could thus be carbon-dated, should not be dismissed out of hand.

Ahem, perhaps this makes plain why I would not recommend this book to readers first exposing themselves to the work of Anthony Burgess. Readers familiar with Burgess will find all the familiar themes: Joycean word play (run rather amok here), ribald allusions, digressions on musicology (drolly focusing on the percussive here) and scads of witty badinage, against the backdrop of the absurdities of war and love and life and sex and other generalities that don't immediately come to mind. The general purport of which is summed up by "Reg", who gets all the best lines, thusly:

"We can't be blamed for dreaming what we dream. It's another self that does the dreaming. We have too many selves. No wonder we're scared of sleep sometimes. Another self taking over. History is all about the other selves. Not the selves that eat and make love and play music. O God, kindly deliver us from our other selves."

Not that the book, narrated by a self-confessed terrorist, gives the faintest impression, that God, if and in whatever form he may or may not exist, is about to do this any time in the near future. Summing up, a very fun read indeed - but probably not for Burgessian non-initiates - written by a mad Englishman, narrated by a Zionist terrorist with an MA in Philosophy, and chock full of weird etymologies and such related to Arthurian legend and the aforesaid Cymric Nationalist revolutionary or devolutionary movement. Only word-drunk readers with dirty minds need apply.