Confessions of a Justified Sinner Read Online Free

damn.’ The allusion specifically made, what next?
    The devil comes back into Enderby’s orbit as Miranda Boland, an expert on moon studies. She tries to seduce him (he’s impotent), tries to inspire him to compose rubbishy sentimental verses, and exploits his docility. On the run following the murder of a pop singer he’s not quite sure he committed, he arrives, disguised and babbling that his name is now Puerco, in Tangier — Miranda on his trail. As a diabolist, she is capable of altering her state. Like the waxing and waning of the moon, she has the ability to look thin or fat, slim or ugly, depending on her mood. She is affected too by the proximity of the sea and tides. Burgess indulges in much typical wordplay about sea =
la mer
and mother-in-law =
la belle-mère
— the step-mother and mother-in-law figure being Enderby’s chief hate and primal arch fiend. (‘You’ve been doing your damndest to turn into my step-mother,’ he eventually snarls at most of his wives.) La Belle Mer is the name of the bayside bar he comes to work at.
    By the time of
The Clockwork Testament
, Enderby is in the psychic hell of New York, a visiting professor of creative writing at a university. The novel is chiefly notable for its attempts to pretend that a serious and lengthy theological debate — about free will versus predestination — can be given any narrative excitement. Burgess offers us tutorials, slanging matches in bars, the transcripts of television talk shows. (Why didn’t he simply climb into a pulpit?) His ideas merely reproduce didactically what Hogg explored dramatically — ‘If you get rid of evil you get rid of choice. You’ve got to have things to choose between, and that means good
and
evil. If you don’t choose, you’re not human anymore. You’re something else. Or you’re dead.’ Or you are a clockwork orange — like Alex, in Burgess’s most famous novel, his brain scoured of nastiness, lobotomized, an ambling strange fruit. ‘Human beings are defined by freedom of choice. Once you have them doing what they’re told is good just because they’re going to get a lump of sugar instead of a kick, then ethics no longer exist.’
    According to Burgess, we are each of us a mixture of volatile compounds, ‘forepunished’ for our wrongdoings, at liberty to carry out ‘mixed rape and torture and cannibalism’. It is up to each individual to exert self-control and decide which way to proceed in the garden of the forking paths. Burgess mentions the myth of Oedipus, compelled to choose at the crossroads, and focusing many Freudian dilemmas as a result: a disposal of the father-figure, love of the mother, and so on. Such anxieties may also be found in Hogg, scores of years before Freud. That demonology has a sexual cause, for example, is perceptively put across in ‘The Witches of Traquair’, where the supernatural and the gothic are ways for Hogg to explore and explain the bored and disappointed outlook, the neuroses, of people who are growing old: ‘Women, beyond a certain age, when the pleasures and hopes of youth delighted no more, flew to witchcraft as an excitement of a higher and more terrible nature …’ Black magic is an explanation for what we’d now talk about as the hormonal imbalance of the menopause — just as the fevers of adolescence are ascribed to witchcraft in Arthur Miller’s play,
The Crucible.
    That Robert’s own devil-worship and ‘ungovernable passions’ coincide with the uproar and hazards of young adulthood are further evidence of his tragedy’s connection with whatever sensations were rushing through his nervous system — his life and death might all have biochemical underpinnings, his visions brainstorms ‘on a blue islet of ether, in a whole sky of blackest cloudage’ (to use Coleridge’s attempt at describing what became known as the subconscious). Virtually a century before it was clinically diagnosed, Hogg’s book demonstrates the symptoms of