The Wanting Seed (Norton Paperback Fiction)

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The Wanting Seed begins in a world that is vastly overpopulated, and extreme measures have been institutionalized to handle it. People live in tiny box apartments, homosexuality is the social norm (and it's policed), and everyone eats a protein mush as there just aren't enough damn cows in the world to handle the load. As you wrap your head around this world (seems like it would be easier to just castrate people instead of implemented totalitarian fabulousness), Burgess throws a curve ball and suddenly society collapses. Pelphase is named after Pelagianism, the theology of Pelagius. The Pelphase is characterised by the belief that people are generally good. Crimes have slight punishment, and the government tries to improve the population. The government works through socialism. According to Tristram "A government functioning in its Pelagian phase commits itself to the belief that man is perfectible, that perfection can be achieved by his own efforts, and that the journey towards perfection is along a straight road." The novel begins – and ends – in Pelphase.

Well, it’s an old book [the Bible] full of smut. The big sin is to waste your seed, and if God loves you He fills your house with kids...””Tristram's horrifying realization about the "war" doesn't amount to much. Although he swears to the Army Major that he's going to expose the injustice of it all, in the end, Tristram does what everybody else seems to be doing: he adjusts, and gets on with his regular life. Resolution (Denouement) Deep Blue Sea

Interphase is the darkening of Pelphase into Gusphase – an "Intermediate" phase. As Tristram explains things, the government grows increasingly disappointed in its population's inability to be truly good, and thus police forces are strengthened and the state becomes Totalitarian. In many respects, Interphase is a finite version of George Orwell's 1984. The Wanting Seed is a great read. Part societal study and certainly a criticism of British society. Anthony Burgess ask what happens to British society if the population overwhelms food supplies. This has been called a comedy, but I am not sure I agree. It is certainly satire, but not so sure it is funny. He certainly lampoons the upper crust and social climbers along with British stoicism, yet it is wrapped in tragedy. The Wanting Seed is not the only dystopia dealing with reproductive freedom and overpopulation in the 1960s. In Burgess’s world, the failure of birth control leads governments to control the populace by eliminating citizens through orchestrated wars whose sole purpose is to kill people. Logan’s Run, the 1967 novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, depicts the future world of 2116, where citizens are executed with a pleasure-inducing toxic gas as soon as they have reached the age of 21. Overpopulation is also the subject of Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison, a 1966 novel, later adapted as the film Soylent Green (1973), starring Charlton Heston. As with The Wanting Seed, the film’s solution to famine caused by overpopulation is to convert people into food, the ‘soylent green’ of the title. Burgess claims in his autobiography that ‘Harry Harrison, on his own confession during the downing of a bottle of Scotch in my New York flat, stole the ending for the film of his novel No Room! No Room! [sic] called Soylent Green.’ Burgess may have misremembered this. As the writer Ramsey Campbell has noted, the novel has a different ending, and Harry Harrison was excluded from the production of Soylent Green by the film-makers. It is clear that many themes and ideas are shared between The Wanting Seed and the film version of Soylent Green, although Harrison himself seems not to have been responsible for the plagiarism.PDF / EPUB File Name: The_Wanting_Seed_-_Anthony_Burgess.pdf, The_Wanting_Seed_-_Anthony_Burgess.epub Old Gus in the Mail Room, in which Ron was a runner, called it - leering - a BY-HAND. So wise-guy Ron learned to leer knowingly too. He considered himself Wiser than other Goody-goody Simpletons.

NEVER undergoes a monstrous "Sea Change" into such a monstrous, "Rich and Strange" transmogrification as in this book. The book closes with a translation of the final stanza of the French poet Paul Valéry's poem ' Le Cimetière marin'. The quotation clarifies the book's themes: But where the novel really succeeds is representing how each authoritarian figure in the novel grasps almost mindlessly at the next perfect doctrine for controlling the world, be it a general whose only understanding of war is through old movies and the War Poets (a man of many famous first lines) or Tristram's brother, who callously jumps onto each new moral ideal, going from a leader in the INFERTILITY POLICE, needing to hide his illegitimate children in fear of being arrested, to a higher-up in the FERTILITY POLICE, now using those same bastard children as a method of advancing his career. I originally wanted to read this book after seeing it referenced in a review paper on Calhoun's rodents, which investigated the effect of overpopulation on the psychology and behaviour of rats in a utopian environment. The idea behind it interested me greatly and I was eager to see Burgess' interpretation. It's the germ of pop-up Mad Ads spiralling through our brains, having issue in a new paucity - a desert of endless wanting - in an environment of plenty, which morphs in turn, overnight, into scarcity.Anthony Burgess was born in Manchester in 1917 and educated at Xaverian College and Manchester University. He served in the British army from 1940 to 1946 and was a schoolteacher in England before becoming a colonial education officer in 1954. His Malayan trilogy of novels and a history of English literature were published while he was living in Malaya and Brunei. The orthodox view presents man as a sinful creature from whom no good at all may be expected... It eventually appears that human social behaviour is rather better than any Augustinian pessimist has any right to expect, and so a sort of optimism begins to emerge. And so Pelagianism is reinstated." Characters [ edit ] He became a full-time writer in 1959 and achieved a worldwide reputation as one of the most versatile novelists of his day. His writings include biographies of Shakespeare and Hemingway, critical studies of James Joyce, stage plays, and two volumes of autobiography. His work as a composer and librettist includes the Broadway musical, Cyrano, and Blooms of Dublin, an operetta based on Joyce's Ulysses. The threat to reproductive freedom in dystopian novels is often used as a metaphor for wider social freedoms. The principle of family life being free from intervention by governments is a major element in discussions about human rights. Dystopian fiction often questions the limits of state power, and it contributes to ongoing debates about how many new lives should (or should not) be created, to ensure the future happiness of all citizens.

Tristram Foxe and his wife, Beatrice-Joanna, live in their skyscraper world where official family limitation glorifies homosexuality. Eventually, their world is transformed into a chaos of cannibalistic dining-clubs, fantastic fertility rituals, and wars without anger. It is a novel both extravagantly funny and grimly serious. The Wanting Seed by Anthony Burgess – eBook Details I guess the basic premise is that the world is overpopulated, so you're limited to how many children you can have. But polite, genteel people don't have any. Part One of The Wanting Seed is all about the Exposition. As we follow Beatrice-Joanna and Tristram around on a less-than-ordinary day, we learn almost everything we need to know about the dystopian world they inhabit. As the twelfth and thirteenth chapters wrap up with the news that Beatrice-Joanna is probably pregnant again, and that a brand new Population Police Force has been set upon the city, we're well primed for the novel's Rising Action. Rising Action (Conflict, Complication) Not-So-Hot Fuzz In Anthony Burgess’ The Wanting Seed, the story starts off, in what is known to the main character, Tristram, as the Pelphase. Tristram is a history teacher and knows mostly all there is to know about history. According to Tristram, governments go through three phases: the Pelphase, the Interphase, and the Gusphase. Tristram believes that like almost everything else, government is cyclical. The Pelphase is a time in the government and society where the people are working to better themselves, their surroundings and their country. A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

The people don’t just work for themselves; they work together. Overpopulation has always been a problem in the futuristic London that Burgess portrays. God has become a myth even though some still practice their religion. God has turned into some sort of Santa Clause because everyone is working to better the problems that they and the government are having. The government suggests that homosexuality could help the population troubles, but they don’t enforce it or make it law. The Wanting Seed] is wildly and fantastically funny. …Here too is all the usual rich exuberance of Mr. Burgess's vocabulary, his love of quotations and literary allusions--the book ends with a quotation from Valery--his fantastic dream and nightmare sequences. …a remarkable and brilliantly imaginative novel, vital and inventive." The Wanting Seed watches the death of government, but not of a people and how somehow they manage to carry on in their own way. How different levels of society first react and then respond to the failing food and their way of rationalization to differentiate themselves from the "others" and their lower ways. It is also a analogy of changing times England faced when the book was written and should be seen in this light. It is a statement of the ordinary average man in changing times where he no longer recognizes his place. Nothing is normal and the world he knows is gone upside down. A tightly wound caseworker is pushed out of his comfort zone when he’s sent to observe a remote orphanage for magical children.