INTERVIEW: Adam Roberts on Finishing an Unpublished Anthony Burgess Novel

There is both a generational and personal attachment to Burgess in Roberts’ case, and his great love of the author becomes clear as he explains his earliest memories of Burgess’ work, and how his appreciation for the man and his work grew as time progressed: “I grew up reading Burgess: late 70s/early 80s he was everywhere: on telly, reviewing all sorts of things in the papers, when one of his books came out it was a big event. A particular memory I have is when Earthly Powers was up for the 1980 Booker Prize (as it was then called) against William Golding’s Rites of Passage. Golding winning is surely one of the more egregious wrong-calls in literary prize history: and I very much remember the huge fuss in the media at the time. At any rate, I read a fair amount of Burgess when I was younger, although never in any systematic manner. I never read a book of his that I didn’t love. He is so ingenious, passionate and word-drunk, and he always takes seriously the novel’s responsibility to entertain as well as to stretch the reader’s mind. When the Black Prince project got up and running I prepared for it by re-reading the whole run of Burgess’s fiction in chronological order, which meant re-readingf lots of things and finally filling in the blanks in my knowledge. Doing this really reinforced my sense that he is simply one of the 20th-century’s greatest anglophone writers.”

But when I ask about how he took up the challenge of writing in Burgess’ voice, Roberts explained to me how that was only one piece of a much larger puzzle: “It wasn’t just Burgess’s style. His idea for the book was to adopt the style of the American Modernist writer John Dos Passos. If you don’t know him you should: his U.S.A. trilogy (originally published between 1930 and 1936) is a masterpiece, written in this restlessly experimental style that swaps about between mosaics of excerpts from newspapers, impressionistic prose-poems, attempts to capture the ‘camera’s eye’ of the then-new technologies of cinema and more conventional narrative prose. So I was ‘doing’ Burgess ‘doing’ Dos Passos, and trying at all times to keep both those voices in play. Insofar as my own voice is there too — and it’s inevitable, I think, that a writer’s voice flavours what s/he writes, even when they copy somebody else — its part of that mix, rather than separate inserts or moments.”

But of course, creating The Black Prince wasn’t an independent task, nor was it one that could be undertaken without a great deal of research. Adam Roberts liaised heavily with both the Burgess Foundation and Burgess Institute to help him in his quest to re-imagine the lost work.

“Burgess himself died in the 1990s, and both his widow and their son are dead now, so there’s nobody from the family left to oversee the legacy,” Roberts tells me, “but there is a Burgess Foundation, and a Burgess Institute in Manchester run by Andrew Biswell, who is the world’s expert on Burgess, and a very nice man to boot. Burgess’s work is still in copyright of course, so I’ve been liaising with the literary agency that represents his novels. But everybody was very professional, and I got the strong sense of how passionate Andrew and the Foundation are when it comes to keeping Burgess’s flame burning.”

Publishing as a business is currently in a very interesting place, with independent authors now having more options than ever before for self-publishing their own work. There are now a multitude of ways and means for writers to get their work out to readers beyond traditional publishing methods, including blogs, pod-fiction, Amazon’s KDP program and more. In Roberts’ case, he is utilising the crowdfunding platform Unbound to bring The Black Prince to life.

“This is my first experience of crowdfunding,” he explains, “I first came across Unbound when one of their books — Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake — was longlisted for the Booker, and I read it and loved it. Conventional publishing is in a sticky place, as ebook sales rise (but not necessarily the ebooks sold by conventional publishers), physical book sales shrink, advances shrivel and the old models no longer obtain. It’s an interesting question whether Unbound’s business model will be one of the things that thrives in the new market. At any rate: when it came to this project, I wondered in Burgess’s wider appeal might compensate for my more niche reputation, and make crowdfunding viable. We’re at 69% of our target (as of writing), so we’ll see. Check the Unbound page to watch the pledge percentage creep (I hope!) ever upward. You can keep up to date on the project, and even ask me questions directly.”

Thank you to Adam Roberts for taking the time to talk to us. You can follow him on Twitter here, or view more information on The Black Prince here.