Books: Virgil on the Rock

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A VISION OF BATTLEMENTS by Anthony Burgess. 241 pages. Norton. $4.50.

"The Rock." The term has been a designation for many places by men suffering from civic disability—Alcatraz, Guam, Oahu—but the old original Rock was Gibraltar, that whale-headed monolith that was a minor prize and major symbol of the British Empire in its grandest days. Mocked the anti-imperialist Catholic poet Chesterton: "Gibraltar's a rock that you see very plain, and attached to its base is the district of Spain."

Anthony Burgess, also an English Catholic satirist, tells of a painful, three-year tour of duty on Gibraltar during and after the end of World War II. There he suffered not only the unrewarding frustrations of rear-echelon soldiering, but also the discovery—agonizing for a young man—that his vocation for music was, if not false, secondary to an untested talent for writing. The result might well have been a damp dollop of self-pity; A Vision of Battlements is anything but that. It is a high-spirited cadenza amid the brassy cacophony of war, played by a born verbal musician. Among the fictional souvenirs of World War II, mostly heavy, khaki-colored, lugubrious and dull, this is a glittering bit of Faberge loot—a bauble to defeat boredom. It also marks the first creation, though not publication (which was delayed 16 years), of the anti-hero in postwar fiction, the first of the Lucky Jims.

Pips & Crowns. Richard Ennis, with serious war in Dunkirk and Crete behind him, has been posted to the Rock. He is a foul-up sergeant in the Army Vocational and Cultural Corps, lecturing to monoglot Italian P.O.W.s, illiterate dockers and military no-hope types who are detailed to educational "parades" because nothing useful can be found for them to do. The Rock is not designed to sustain human life; it is a "chunk of strategic geology." It has escaped Axis capture only because—the bitter story goes—an American insurance company did not want its corporate symbol compromised. The Rock's only happy denizens are the Barbary apes—sexually emancipated pensioners who seem to be contemptuously aware of the superstition that the British will never leave the Rock until the death of the last ape.

Meanwhile, the British enact high military farce; the war has lost its point, and the rear echelon is a jungle of red tape and "bumf" in which the conniver, the spiv and the apple polisher win the pips, the crowns and the privilege. Ennis is fatally handicapped—and funny—not because he is himself farcical but because he is serious—about love, about music, and about the postwar world. Gallantly, he survives each pratfall (even when ordered to take a class in elementary shorthand when he should have been waving his long hands over an orchestra sawing out his own music). The reader laughs uneasily; this is no ordinary slapstick, nor a Chaplinesque comedy of awkward grace amid military bullies and oafs.