Eschatology & Espionage

TREMOR OF INTENT by Anthony Burgess. 239 pages. Norton. $4.95.

Denis Hillier, a middle-aged spy looking forward to retirement, embarks on his last mission: to kidnap a turncoat British scientist named Roper, who is cooking rocket fuel for Russia. Adventures both sexual and gastronomic occur en route, for Hillier is a gluttonous satyr. Men die bloodily, some of them propelled into the hereafter by Hillier himself. The mission fails, not for want of Hillier's trying, but because his quarry refuses to go back.

Len Deighton and John le Carre have written such spy stories, and so did the late Ian Fleming. The literary chromosomes of Graham Greene, C. P. Snow and Vladimir Nabokov are also traceable in this deliberate hybrid. But Anthony Burgess is not trying to imitate them. He has never written an unoriginal novel or an unlaminated one. Every Burgess surface conceals another, like Salome's veils, and they must all peel off to expose the author's naked core. In this exceptional book, subtitled An Eschatological Spy Novel, the reader quickly discovers that Burgess has much more on his mind than international intrigue.

Scientific Skepticism. At the subterranean level, the book deals with moral issues that seem remote from spydom's amoral domain. As a schoolboy, Roper applied scientific skepticism to religion. "Does Christ reside in the molecules themselves," he asked, pondering the Eucharist, "or only in the molecules organized into bread?" Later, war service destroyed both his worlds, religion and science: "What's the point of fighting if we don't believe that one way of life is better than another?"

Hillier, too, has his private Gethsemane. A nominal Catholic, like the scientist, he plays the espionage game as a man who has withdrawn from both sides--a disillusioned and cynical neutralist, proud of his prowess in bed and at table. Aboard a ship bearing him to a Russian Black Sea port, Hillier gorges himself at both. In a stateroom, he literally tangles with an extraordinarily supple Indian girl who is an expert at the extracurricular forms to which the Kama Sutra is only a primer. In the dining room, an eating contest with another passenger becomes the most hilarious bit of trenchermanship since Albert Finney and Joyce Redman fed their faces in Tom Jones,

But these activities are Hillier's veils, and soon they must reveal his deepening moral crisis. Once behind the Iron Curtain, he finds Roper and discovers that the scientist did not turn his coat after all: he was shanghaied. Furthermore, nobody really wants him: neither the Russians, who accepted him only as a useful political pawn, nor the English, who jobbed him for much the same reason. Hillier also finds that nobody wants him either. He was sent to Russia so that an assassin, hired by his own intelligence agency, could erase a mind already too full of dangerous secrets.

Ulterior & Ultimate. A Burgess book is never easy to put down or forget. This one, too, is likely to stir thoughts that will linger longer than its surface tensions. The reader may feel, however, that he has encountered some of Trem ors eschatology before. Hillier's religious experience mirrors that of Richard Ennis in A Vision of Battlements, Burgess' first novel. In A Clockwork Orange, Burgess emphasized the importance of free will, whether for good or evil. Tremor emphasizes it again, but perhaps less successfully.

"If we're going to save the world," says Hillier at the end, "we shall have to use unorthodox doctrines as well as unorthodox methods. Don't you think we'd all rather see devil-worship than bland neutrality?" He has resolved his own crisis not only by reclaiming his faith but by becoming a priest. "Everything's an imposture," he says. "The real war goes on in heaven." Now an earthly combatant for the church, he suggests that he will fight the war as "a real impostor," perhaps as a tourist. "But the war won't be cold anymore. And it won't be just between East and West."

Eschatology and espionage do not readily mix; one deals in the ultimate, the other in the ulterior. Yet Burgess, stirring with memorable characterization and wit, has succeeded in serving up one of the best spy novels since The Spy Who Came In from the Cold.

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