• ■••■••••••"Fiction
No jokes
Paul Ableman
Cities of the Red Night William S. 13t11.roughs (John Calder pp. 332, £9.95) Twenty years ago, William Burroughs pub,lished the most brilliant satire in Engt since Gulliver's Travels. The Naked Dino' indeed, has many points of similarity wit", Swift's masterpiece: a mocking contempt for power and its wielders, a shrinklag disgust from the flesh (in both cases resulting in some of the most revolting scatalogical passages ever printed), a v1s14" of mankind as almost irredeemably base, a keen eye for moral soft spots in the. prevailing culture, a hatred of jargon and pomposity, a profound comic sense, a fierce indignation about privilege and, far from least, a tough, flexible prose style. The chief difference was that Burroughs provided no Gulliver, no voyager of good" will, with whom the reader could identifY. The Naked Lunch was structured like. „a fairground, a series of booths each vYine' with the next to present a more shocking' alarming or grotesque attraction. But the fundamental impulse of the two books was the same: to rub mankind's nose in its °II filth and, hopefully, turn it into a cleaner and nobler beast. Cities of the Red Night is, according to it,s blurb, 'without doubt William Burroughs s magnum opus, perhaps even more imPt31.' tant than The Naked Lunch'. Alas, it is not, and it gives me much pain to have to say pile The new book is to the old one as a of rubble is to a cathedral. It is discernibly made o from itasaymeliz.aterials but it o has ne It does, however, start well with what Burroughs calls a Tore: 'The liberad principles embodied in the French alti.„ American revolutions and later in tti` liberal revolutions of 1848 had already been codified and put into practice by Pi,rat-e communes a hundred years earlier. French buccaneer, Captain Mission, seems, founded a fraternal settlement In Madagascar which, according to Bur; roughs, could have provided a model for sane world. So far so good. Then we get a, 11_ 'Invocation': 'This book is dedicated to tno Ancient Ones, to the Lord of Abomitiai tions, Humwawa, whose face is a Mass 19, entrails, whose breath is the stench of dollgi,4 Well — yes — that's recognisably the Burrovian spirit. We reach Book on'' section one: 'The Health Officer': 'September 13, 1923. Farnsworth, the District Health Ox. was a man so grudging in what he asked of life that every win was a loss; yet he was not without a certain plodding persistence 1, effort and effectiveness in his limited area, All right, so we're to have a narrative n I decent, journalistic prose — disappointi in from a stylist of Burroughs's calibre but acceptable. But soon doubt begins to set in. 'n the very next section, headed: 'We see Tibet with the binoculars of the People', we Join commander Yen Lee scouting a village Whose inhabitants have been stricken by a loathesorne plague. There follow two sections about a certain Doctor Pierson pursuing a virus and then we are plunged back into the early 18th century and young Noah' ,Blake putting out to sea with Captain `-'Phun Jones on the schooner 'The Great White'. Before long, and restored to the contemporary world, a private investigator (self-styled 'private asshole') Clem Williamson Snide who, like several others in the cast list, is really an intruder from Burroughs's earlier books, is embarking on a long investigation into the case of a boy Who has been decapitated. Well, there's nothing necessarily wrongl with employing intertwining plots that are all part of a master concept. But the ' subversive question kept surfacing in my mind: was there originally a master concept? The impression conveyed by the Chaotic structure was rather that of several previously abandoned stories having been bundled together and held in place with flimsy cross-references. Certainly, for the reader, all sense of continuity and purpose S000 vanish into self-indulgent phantasmagoria, The narrative, making convulsive, but bootless, efforts to lift itself onto the Planes of vision and poetry, reverts obsessionally to certain themes: drugs, excrement, hanging, metamorphosis, weapons and homosexuality. Now these key themes NLvere, in The Naked Lunch, used as prisms 13, Y means of which reality could be analysed Into its constituent colours. In the present ‘york their role is merely incantatory: 'From the pointed crystal tip he quivers out a Shower of red sparks that spatter the stranger's body with burning erogenous sores that twist and writhe into diseased lips whtsPering the sweet rotten fever words.' The book is being driven on by the author's Will rather than by the imagination demanding expression. About two-thirds of my weary way through this I suddenly thought: 'My God, surely The Naked Lunch was funny!' .Cities of the Red Night did not make me laugh even once. :William Burroughs, in his prime, had the ahility to generate wistful and deceptively! simple propositions that had the power to s up profound resonances. One such was: The word lines have gone wrong.' At one level the author surely meant that imagina t.aioins the human race in its strange voyage n embodied in language no longer susthrough time In The Naked Lunch Bur roughs made a heroic attempt to warp the Word lines back on course, But the strain Whhas have been immense and his strength , as given out. In Cities of the Red Night the ord lines have writhed away into a mindless void.
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