Any Old Iron - Hardcover

Burgess, Anthony

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0394574842 ISBN 13: 9780394574844

Publisher: Random House, 1989

Synopsis

In a sweeping historical novel moving from the sinking of the "Titanic" to World War II and the birth of Israel, two families--one Welsh and one Irish--are bound together by love, friendship, and an ancient myth

About this title

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0394574842
• ISBN 13: 9780394574844
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 360