[Anthony Burgess's] twenty-odd volumes of fiction range over vast immensities of time and space, and are full of flashy erudition and restless experiments with language and form.

In one of his early novels, The Right to an Answer (1960), Burgess proved himself a mordantly funny satirist, expert at the outraged snarl against society that has been a staple of postwar British fiction and that reached comic perfection in the work of Kingsley Amis. In Davil of a State and the trilogy, The Long Day Wanes, drawing upon his colonial years in Malaya, Burgess was a canny and unsentimental chronicler of the death rattle of empire, perceiving it as a tragicomedy of misconception and fatally crossed wires between incongruent races and cultures. But in his later work it has become clear that his unique brilliance lies not in the fields that Evelyn Waugh, E. M. Forster, and Graham Greene have...