Books: A Deadly Round

THE WANTING SEED by Anthony Burgess. 285 pages. Norton. $3.95.

Anthony Burgess is a fantasist who has bad dreams. The Clockwork Orange (TIME, Feb. 15) concerned a police state so extreme that a teen-age rapist who talks in half-human gibberish be comes a symbol of heroic rebellion. The Wanting Seed is far less disastrous, but in its penny-plain style, it is a portrait of an anti-utopia that can be ranked with those of Orwell and Huxley.

Burgess postulates an earth of perhaps two or three hundred years in the future. Overpopulation is the all but in soluble problem. Cities have swallowed the earth; food, when it is to be had, is limited to processed fish, meat and milk substitutes (meat and dairy animals require too much land).

In this extremity, Burgess supposes, government follows a deliberate and predictable cycle. At first, government tries to limit population by propaganda, free contraceptives, the encouragement of infanticide (a "condolence" fee is paid to any bereaved parent), and the fostering of homosexuality.

But these measures do not work; the population rises. Government despairs of society's perfectibility and becomes harshly repressive. Parenthood becomes a political crime; pregnant women are executed. Grey-shirted population police, effeminate and giggling, swagger insolently through the streets.

But this Interphase does not last either. Terror begets chaos and rebellion. Society becomes a series of skirmishes among bands of murderous looters. And here the Augustinian, or Gusphase, begins — a time of warring armies, when government policy is based on the unshakable evil of man's nature.

Burgess leads the reader skillfully through the cycle. His antihero, a nonentity named Foxe, halfheartedly shovels history at fifth formers in the first phase. During Interphase, he is a political prisoner and then a refugee, frantic to eat and not be eaten (cannibalism is part of the chaotic interregnum). In the third phase, Foxe enlists in an army whose sole function, it turns out, is to relieve the population pressure by annihilating another army—and itself.

The horror of this book is not that men breed, swarm and die like insects. It is rather that hope is always held out, and always perverted, as the world turns through its three-part cycle. Burgess' vision is both sophisticated and cynical, and there is not a line of it that seems impossible.