Clockwork Plot

By John Skow

ANY OLD IRON

by Anthony Burgess

Random House; 368 pages; $19.95

If one of pop lit's earnest plonkers had written this clumsy, lively, thoroughly entertaining family saga of war and romance, no reader would have puzzled over deep currents that seem unaccountably shallow. Anthony Burgess, however, is one of literature's certified mandarins, known as an explicator of Ulysses (Re Joyce), a postapocalyptic moralist (A Clockwork Orange), and a scholar showily at home in a double handful of ancient and modern languages. He wigwags strenuously at the outset of this new novel that primal, mythic stuff is ahead -- ancient tales threading through the dark, tribal roots of 20th century bloody-mindedness.

His narrator, who describes himself as a retired terrorist (he fought to establish Israel), refers to a belief among Welsh nationalists that an old steel sword briefly on view in England was actually King Arthur's. The narrator points out that Arthur may not have existed, and that whatever sword he owned would surely have rusted to nothing. He admits, however, that the sword in question was engraved with the letter A. And he retails the scholarly notion that long before it belonged to the proprietor of Camelot it was the legendary Sword of Mars, said to make its wielder invincible, discovered on the Hungarian plain and owned by none other than Attila the Hun.

This seems to portend more than what follows, which is a long, fairly routine mini-series of a novel. Without appearing to have much on his mind, the author follows the adventures of three families -- one Welsh, one Russian- American, one Jewish-English -- through three wars. The founding patriarch is a young ship's cook, a Welshman named David Jones, first seen surviving the sinking of the Titanic. He meets and marries a beautiful Russian immigrant named Ludmila in New York City, resettles in England, volunteers for the army, is mistakenly reported dead in World War I, and so on. Children are born, grow up, fall in love or lechery, go to war.

Mighty events pass quickly; 40 years of calamitous European history slide by as a diverting panorama. No character is on view long enough to be irksome, or for the reader to wonder unduly at arbitrary choices of personal traits and adventures assigned by the author. Burgess, as always, throws in bits of the many languages he knows, mostly untranslated. But where the invented Russian- English slang in Clockwork Orange had a brilliant sting to it (horrorshow from horosho, meaning good, and lewdies from lyudi, people), the phrases here in Russian and Latin appear, after a dash to the dictionary, to be quite ordinary, not the keys to unsuspected puzzles.

The narrative does a complicated backbend, for instance, in order to refer to a Russian restaurant in London named "the Sutky (so called because it was open day and night)." This comes at a point weighty with literary allusions to Crime and Punishment, so the reader suspects hidden meanings and looks up sutky. No allusions here; all it means is "a day and a night." Marvelous; now we know another Russian word. Perhaps the scraps in Welsh, Turkish, Greek and Hebrew offer magical insights, perhaps not. The suspicion is that they are simply authentic sound effects. You skip them, the way in another kind of writing you skip descriptions of furniture and scenery.

In the end the sword does turn up, after some unlikelihoods normal to popular adventure. Perhaps it was Arthur's, but Burgess, who invented it, now seems to feel that it doesn't much matter. Both he and his characters discount Welsh nationalism as unserious playacting. One of his protagonists, in exasperation, chucks the sword into a pond, where it sinks without a deathbed speech. He explains, "I had to grasp a chunk of the romantic past and find it rusty." Which does not entirely answer a last-page question to the author: "What was that all about?"