For Fans of Anthony Burgess

Stanley Kubrick's film is one of the great screen adaptations, and Anthony Burgess resented it for the rest of his life. The problem was not the violence; the problem was the ending. The American edition of the novel dropped Burgess's 21st chapter, in which Alex outgrows his brutality and begins to grow up. Kubrick filmed from that truncated text. What was meant to be a novel about the possibility of moral development became, on screen, a nihilist icon. Burgess spent decades insisting the missing chapter existed, that the story had a point. The film is extraordinary and the argument is worth sitting with: what do we lose when we cut the redemption from a story about whether redemption is possible?

The opening line of Earthly Powers is among the most famous in 20th-century British fiction, but the rest of the novel is obscure in the way that long, ambitious, difficult books become obscure: people agree it is important and do not finish it. That is a shame. Spanning most of the 20th century through the memoirs of an aged homosexual novelist modelled loosely on Somerset Maugham, it is Burgess's attempt at a grand Catholic-humanist reckoning with evil, charisma, and what saints cost the people around them. It is funnier and stranger than its reputation as a doorstop suggests. If you have only read A Clockwork Orange, Earthly Powers is the place to go next.

Inventing a dialect for your protagonist is a party trick. Inventing one so precisely calibrated that a reader absorbs it unconsciously and begins to understand it without being told is something else. Burgess built Nadsat from Russian roots, Cockney rhyming slang, and a few coinages of his own, and then trusted readers to catch up. By the end of A Clockwork Orange most readers have internalised the vocabulary. That process -- the way language shapes what you can think and feel -- is the real subject of the book. The droogs speak Nadsat; the State speaks the language of therapy; neither is innocent.

Written in 1962, the same year as A Clockwork Orange, The Wanting Seed is Burgess at his most sardonic. The novel swings between two poles of government response to overpopulation: a permissive Pelagian phase that celebrates homosexuality and non-reproduction, and a Augustinian phase of brutal authoritarian repression, cycling endlessly. Burgess thought societies oscillate between these poles rather than progressing. The book is lighter in tone than A Clockwork Orange, almost farcical, which makes its diagnosis land harder. It deserves to be read alongside Huxley and Orwell as a third English dystopia, meaner and funnier than either.