Customer Reviews

The Wanting Seed

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Your bookstore is stocked full of novels predicting mankind's future, but none quite like this. With the Wanting Seed, Anthony Burgess turns the typical dystopian novel on its ear. Instead of a methodical, technorganic world, Mr. Burgess presents a smelly, macrobiotic mess of overpopulation and disharmony. Instead of a more stringent emphasis on rightwing ideals, the aforementioned overpopulation has caused an enthusiastic governmental endorsement of homosexuality and opposition to typical family ideals. Instead of a grim, foreboding atmosphere, Mr. Burgess employs a lighthearted, quirky tone, allowing readers to smirk at the ridiculousness and incongruity to which the world of the Wanting Seed has been driven. It is obvious that Mr. Burgess, the same literary practical joker who filled his best-know book, A Clockwork Orange, with make-up slang, meant to poke some well-needed fun at the dismal 1984/Brave New World genre.

But just because the Wanting Seed is a work of playful parody and dark comedy does not mean there is nothing profound about it. In fact if I had to pick the one dystopian novel towards which our society is most surely leaning, it would be this one (which is pretty amazing considering it was written in 1962). As counties like China and India are regulating procreation and instituting their own versions of Mr. Burgess' "population police" and the value of human life wilts ever downward, I wonder how close we are to vision of the Wanting Seed. The novel stands as a warning that repressing man's natural urges and diminishing his worth is not the answer to the problem. Your bookstore is stocked full of novels predicting mankind's future, but few as startling and important as this.

Most people will doubtlessly read this book along side or in light of the more famous dystopian novels, such as "1984", "Brave New World", and (let us not forget) "Anthem", and rightfully so. In this literary conversation that considers how humans would respond to different versions of a futuristic totalitarianism, "The Wanting Seed" has its own unique perspective. However, unlike some of these other novels, when it is when forced to stand alone, I'm not sure if it's that great of a read. I gave the book 4 stars because it makes the genre more interesting, but I would have given it 3 stars if I was judging it on its own reading pleasure.

The most interesting aspect of "The Wanting Seed" is Burgess's twist on the usual dystopian plot, where a brave individual battles against some variation of a static, overbearing Big Brother. Instead, Burgess posits a state that has figured out how to gauge and steer man's competing psychological impulses into predictable cycles. Thus, political order is in constant flux between hyper-rational centralization (Rousseau, Marx) and one that gives ample release to Man's all-too-human side (Malthus, Hobbes, Smith). As the novel begins, the political order is at its most rational: homosexuality is encouraged by the state, couples are allowed one child, people eat a state-rationed protein mash, and rules don't have to be enforced by the police. We first meet Beatrice-Joanna Foxe after the death of her only allotted child. The doctor absurdly encourages her to be "modern", "sensible", and of course "rational", telling her to "think about this in national terms, in global terms. One less mouth to feed. One more half-kilo of phosphorus pentoxide to nourish the earth". We then meet her academic husband Tristram, who is also disgruntled by the stifling, prevailing order. It is through Tristram's eyes see all that is unsatisfying in a planned, centralized, and paternalistic state. Naturally, that order collapses due to food shortages and crime (apparently, planned societies can't efficiently feed their people, isn't that right Kim Jong Il?). We then follow Tristram as he seeks out his wife after she leaves him and winds up in the military. All the while and with cannibalistic fun, society moves between various stages of its reordering: from the "state of nature", to ad-hoc tribal units that ensure protection, to the recreation of a militaristic state, and back again to the liberal, rational order. Each stage has outlets for some aspect of Man's will, such as violence and lust, but never all of them, such as security.

While all the political philosophy is great, and there's a few good gags along the way (After hearing a strange tongue, which turn out to be Rabelais, one character must explain that it is "French. One of the Dead Languages."), there are too many unrealized plot lines (what happened to the conflict between Tristram and his brother Derek?) and the key characters at the beginning of the novel disappear. Also, Burgess likes to drop names of his contemporaries in the literai (Halberstam, Toynbee, Maugham, etc.), which is kind of interesting, and why not name the characters after your buddies? But, in addition to some of the frequent and painfully obscure vocabulary Burgess uses (not that I have a wide one to begin with, but don't forget your dictionary), it begins to feel like an internal game or inside joke amongst friends. I don't think this is overt snobbishness, and who cares if it is, but it does make the book drag a bit. Ultimately, "The Wanting Seed" isn't waste of time, and it is a great supplement to a widely read genre of books. However, I think that there is a reason so many people have read "1984", but have not even heard of "The Wanting Seed."

(Written for Worm's Sci Fi Haven by countezero, more of his reviews can be read here: www.wormsscifi.com/haven)


Had Anthony Burgess done something more than write novels that read like fiendishly clever jokes played out at the expense of the literati, he may very well have found his name among the titans of 20th century writers when he died in 1993.

Of the innumerable works Burgess wrote, only a handful of titles remain in print today, all of which share a delicate connection, of some sort, to other literary genres or to actual titans themselves. There's Re Joyce, which I'm sure everyone can easily attach to its provocateur, Nothing Like the Sun, an homage to a certain William Shakespeare, Honey for Bears, which tackles Cold War paranoia by producing a humorous comedy of errors told with the serious confines of a spy novel. All struggle to escape the impressive geometry that is both the foundation and the catalyst for their narrative.

If you are unfamiliar with these works, rest assured you are not alone. The larger world, science fiction fans and film enthusiasts included, know Burgess only for a curious exercise in language he conducted called A Clockwork Orange, a novella whose merits and flaws long ago drowned under the powerful imagery and arresting violence of the Stanley Kubrick film that bears the same name. Having tackled both the morality play and the bildungsroman at the same time with A Clockwork Orange, two genres I feel certain Alex and his devilish little droogs were meant to be making fun of, he set his sites firmly on the theater of future in novel called The Wanting Seed (1962), which can be summed up as a dystopian comedy, if there is such a thing-and if there isn't, so much the better for the punch line of Burgess's grim joke.

To write a dystopian novel, one must seize on some sort ideology or philosophy or another and forecast its ultimate (evil) end, as George Orwell did with socialism in 1984 and Aldous Huxley did with liberalism in Brave New World. True to a novel whose vocabulary often relies on words like rosacea (which means "of roses," according to my Latin dictionary) to describe a person's acne, Burgess has chosen the (somewhat obscure) theories of Thomas Malthus, whose influential Essay on Population (1798) is known, perhaps, to only the most rigorous academics. The nearest mention of Malthus in popular culture is just a few lines above this one, for Huxley called his morning-after birth control agenda the Malthusian-drill in Brave New World. How best to describe Malthus' pessimistic theory of the future? Above all, his writing searches in vain for a "balance between population increase and natural resources." The failure of such balance, which Malthus, like any good prophet of doom, foretold, is the fulcrum for the plot in The Wanting Seed, a devastating novel of practical appraisals that opens with Tristram Foxe and his wife Beatrice-Joanna, the main protagonists, voluntarily putting their child to death at something called the Ministry of Infertility. "One mouth less to feed. One more half-kilo of phosphorus pentoxide to nourish the earth," the doctor says to assuage the grieving mother.

This is the world of rampant overpopulation, where disease, old age, war, pestilence, poverty have all been conquered-to the apparent detriment of human existence. Because of the boom in healthy living, children are almost forbidden and fornication with the opposite sex frowned upon as a waste of energy-"it's sapiens to be homo," a government billboard proclaims in the first few pages of the book.

But as it turns out, Beatrice happens to be something of a woman who enjoys sex with randy men. "She needed two men in her life, her day to be salted with infidelity," Burgess writes. Unbeknownst to her husband, she has taken up with his brother, Derek, a man of some importance at the Ministry of Infertility, who also happens to be masquerading as a homosexual, lipstick, public effeminacy and all, because he is bucking for promotion. Before their tryst, and Beatrice's subsequent impregnation, can be fully discovered, society, as all the Foxes' know it, begins to flake and crumble from an ever increasing inability to feed everyone. The eventual results are both comical and serious. While Tristram rots in jail (thanks to his brother's manipulations) and Beatrice escapes to her sisters to give birth to twins, greater England fantastically reverts to a desperate bacchanalian state of existence, with lavish orgies that anticipate participation in cannibalistic dinners. The totalitarian government recognizes a good thing when it sees it and embraces the new trends, reinstalling religion and warning of a war brewing on the nation's collective horizon. Tristram, freed from jail and on the road searching for his wife, recognizes the shift in politics, but is incapable of doing anything about it-as with all dystopias, this is not a novel of heroes and happy endings, but of people "making the best of things" in circumstances well beyond their control. Like everyone else, he must eat. His stomach eventually leads him to the army, where he suddenly and unexpectedly finds himself fighting in this foreordained war-a war with no enemies and no political goals, and whose actual purpose is one of frightening utility.

Like its author's career, The Wanting Seed suffers, I think, when compared to the lofty peers it shares a particular playing field with, but even so, I've never found a book anywhere that is as penetratingly ironic and humorous as this one. One doesn't laugh when they read Orwell or Huxley, but the reader finds him or herself forced to chuckle when in the midst of this novel's various tribulations. As is the case with most forms of laughter, with The Wanting Seed, we laugh out of self-defense and from familiarity.

Is it as good as A Clockwork Orange? No, it's better.

Five out of Five

The Wanting Seed is a novel set several hundred years in the future. The population growth has exhausted the food supply. The government scorns human reproduction and rewards homosexuality. God and religion are all but outlawed. Soon anarchy reigns and everything is turned upside-down. Realistic? Well, probably not. Consider it to be a "Brave New World" written by someone with a wicked sense of humour. This is not science fiction, but more of a statement criticizing the world today (even though the book was written in the early 60s).

Much of the book really sizzles, with biting satire on nearly every page. However the story eventually runs out of steam (..it deviates to a sub-story involving the military which, while initially interesting, bored this reader). But let this minor fault not deter you from enjoying a witty book.

Bottom line: a rare, yet slightly flawed, gem.

For those who have read A Clockwork Orange, The Wanting Seed is a great second Burgess book to read to get you into an awesome author. The story is also set in the future, where overpopulation is a prevalent problem and unstable governments are in control. With deft wit and careful plot planning, Burgess acts out a political theory through the course of the story--that a supremely liberal government falls to anarchy, then to extreme conservativism as a natural cycle. The metaphor is seamless, and so is Burgess's always clever writing. The characters are led through a parade of adultery, seclusion, cannibalism and unnecessary war in a study of human propagatory nature and the forces that move social institutions. Yes, in the end, Burgess's characters turn out to be more means to the end of his overarching ideas, but the ideas are so fruitful and the plot is so engrossing that it works very well as a whole. Recommended for fans of 1984, Vonnegut, and other Burgess works.

The Wanting Seed is the second best book by Burgess, next to Earthly Powers. This is the first novel of his in which he explicitly describes the "Pelagian Theory" which is a cyclical view of society and governments based on the views of Saint Augustine and the heretic Pelagius (note that Pelagius was from the British Isles). This book is essential if you want to read and understand many of Burgess' works, especially A Clockwork Orange, in which his description of the Pelagian Theory is unformed and unfinished.

In the early sixties Anthony Burgess was diagnosed with a terminal brain desease. Writing like a demon he cranked out several novels in two years thinking he's need to support his family after he passed on. He had been mis-diagnosed, but as a result he wrote a series of novels that are really his best works and some of the best works of the twentieth century in my opinion. "The Wanting Seed" is one of these books.

"The Wanting Seed" much like "A Clockwork Orange" is reminiscent of other novels of a dystopian future such as "1984" and "Brave New World". The quality of writing here by Burgess is nearly the equal of those novels. Perhaps the reason it isn't held in as high esteem is the uncomfortable theme of homosexuality wrapped up in politics that carries through the novel.

And what a novel. A study of Britain in decline and society in constant flux. [adult] codes replace political codes in evaluations for work and promotions. But this is short-lived. It isn't really a novel of [adult] preference because with regime change comes new and different standards.

Burgess has fun mixing political and social expectations and comes off giving a fairly decent commentary on society at large. "The Wanting Seed" is certainly a classic and somewhat unjustly relegated to less than great status behind the other mentioned dystopian novels of the future.

As with most Burgess novels at his best, this one is highly recommended.

Though not reading much of Burgess's literature, I rather enjoyed this book. I found myself entailed in the simplicity of a love story which the book is. As complex as the meaning of the book, I focused on the simplicity. The story of ill-fated lovers in a world full of struggle. The over population problem is very plausible which creates a sense of dread. The future at hand in the book could happen. Every time I read it I find something which I overlooked before. The plot moves smoothly enough to want to finish it. Over all it's a delightful book.

i found this book by pure chance on a library shelf, not knowing a thing about the author at all. i decided to read it. i'm a big fan of "brave new world," "the handmaid's tale," and "1984" and could see similarities between this book and all of those.

though a bit dated, i thoroughly enjoyed the work for the provocative stabs at historiography, the really delightful writing style, which, rife with unusual syntax, allusions, tremendous vocabulary, and many plays on words, never ceased to amaze, and the general ideas contained within.

Anthony Burgess wrote a book called A Clockwork Orange in 1962. Some may have heard of it. It was made into a movie that was a tad popular in its day, and all the press made it sound like it was the only book Mr. Burgess has ever written. Lo and behold, he wrote over 40 books! This one is the book he wrote directly after A Clockwork Orange. It's a very funny and extremely interesting take on the future society where homosexuality is officially encouraged as a way of dealing with over population, and the leadership of the country has to have clandenstine relationships with the opposite sex. There is also a war going on to unite the population. It's a very good read, and Burgess's other works should be better known. He was always ticked that A Clockwork Orange was the only book that anyone ever knew about. Read this one, along with Earthly Powers and Honey for the Bears.