I recently finished reading Honey for the Bears, by Anthony Burgess. Of course his most famous work by far is A Clockwork Orange, although his other writing is highly regarded – and I have to say, Bears was an excellent read, highly recommended, and not just because it has words like “sphingine” (resembling a sphinx).
Still, Burgess falls into a certain category of writers: they are, despite an extensive bibliography, known mainly for one novel, and their other books can be “challenging” to read. This group includes Kingsley Amis, David Lodge, John Wain, Muriel Spark, and (perhaps to a lesser extent) George Orwell. I have started and failed to finish the Enderby novels, Down and Out in Paris and London, and The Anti-Death League. Sometimes the beginning is slow or ungripping – it was a bit of work to get through the first few chapters of Honey for the Bears, for example. Other times, the middle parts drag. A few middle chapters in One Fat Englishman were a slog.
Is it just a British thing? Could it be I am an insufficient Anglophile? The great Dr. Phillip Parotti once said he had similar difficulties at first getting through Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, but I had no similar problems with that American doorstop. Perhaps I am that annoying fanboy who knows Sir Alec only as Obi-Wan Kenobi. Could that be true, even though I watched the whole of the original The Ladykillers (over the course of a few days)?
