by John Lawton
We disagree but slightly on the man himself, but I hasten to add that my Burgess is an interpretation, a fiction based upon a real man rather than a representation of the real man.
While I wrote this I avoided any cinematic portrayal of Burgess. I’d seen Alan Bennett’s television play An Englishman Abroad when it was new … more than thirty years ago … and apart from thinking Alan Bates to be perfect casting, I couldn’t remember much about it. It wasn’t filmed in Moscow (it was Dundee, in fact) so watching it wasn’t going to tell me much about the city, and I’d rather reinvent Burgess than copy Bennett. I watched it four days after I finished this novel—slightly startled at how alike his Burgess and mine were, even to his singing of the same Anglican hymns (at the urinal) I had learnt at school. I was not, I hasten to add, at school with Burgess (I’m not that old!). Oddly, I went to the same school as Bates, but we did not overlap by a small margin (I’m not that old either). But memory refreshed, the Burgess I hear in the lug’ole of the mind is Alan Bates. As I said not a moment ago, perfect casting.
Defection
Anyone who claims to know why Burgess defected is guessing. Neither he nor Maclean left an account, and their movements after they caught the train in Rennes are subject to question. I made my guess—a Burgessian mixture of curiosity and inertia took him to Russia, and after reading the memoirs of his KGB handler, Yuri Modin, I stuck with my guess. That said, every bit of dialogue uttered by either Burgess or Maclean in that chapter is made up. Come to think of it, I think the “Don’t fuck Paul Robeson” line in Chapter 18 might be the only line of dialogue I didn’t make up.
Peredelkino
Burgess did not have a dacha there. I don’t know where his dacha was and the closest I can get ferreting around is the phrase “in the direction of Sheremetyevo.” Not helpful, so I opted for the most famous “colony” of all, well-recorded, as Pasternak also lived there.
Mimram Branch Line and Tewin Water Station
Both are made up. England abounds in the remains of railway lines in daft places, testimony to the folly of Victorian investment, but this was not one of them, and I dearly wish that all the lines and stations that closed in my teens were still up and running … Midsomer Norton, Lyme Regis, Millers Dale.
Dobell’s Jazz Record Shop
It went under the wrecking ball years ago. There was a recording studio in the basement … if memory serves, Bob Dylan cut a record there in the early sixties. I never, knowingly, met the real Mr. Dobell. My Mr. Dobell is fictional.
The Wrong Mozart Piano Concerto
I didn’t make this up, I just ascribed it to my fictional pianist. It happened to the greatest pianist Earth has, Maria João Pires, in Amsterdam, in 1999, at an attended rehearsal (i.e., a lunchtime performance with audience, preparatory to an evening performance) of the D-Minor Concerto with the Concertgebouw under Riccardo Chailly. It appears MJP was expecting the Twenty-first Piano Concerto in C. Interviewed, it was Chailly who talked of the opening rhythm of Mozart’s Twentieth and the feeling of despair. I took my cue from him.
There are Internet “comments” (trolls … whatdafukk is a troll? Answers on a postcard, please) to the effect that this was all a PR stunt, although I cannot see who might need such PR—but, two days after I wrote the scene into this novel I found myself, by chance, at dinner with the first viola of the Concertgebouw, who assured me it was real. Thank you, Peter.
Wheresies
Books get written all over the place. This one was kick-started in Tuscany, tweaked in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, tweaked further in Provincetown Public Library, Cape Cod, and finished at home in England. I think there are even bits of it written on the back of a room service menu from a hotel in Texas.
I didn’t see much of England in 2016. It seemed to rain whenever I was there, but I got me bike fixed up and managed to repaint the verandah in between the showers. A pleasing shade of green.
Caliban
The sculpture is real, and was carved, pretty well as I wrote this book, by David Mackie in his studio in Tuscany.
Caliban
Acknowledgements
Gordon Chaplin
Sam Brown
Marcia Gamble Hadley
Peter Blackstock
Bruce Kennedy
Clare Alexander
Ion Trewin
Nick Lockett
Allison Malecha
Tim Hailstone
Sarah Burkinshaw
Morgan Entrekin
Cristina Zadi
Christine Hellemans
Amy Hundley
Joaquim Fernandez
Niki Chang
Michael Rimmer
Spiggy Topes
Lesley Thorne
Sarah Teale
Gianluca Monaci
Deb Seager
Angela & Tim Tyack
Antonella Piredda
Sister Beryl
Fran Owen
Karen Duffy
Francesca Riccard
Nikky Ward
Sue Freathy
Nev Fountain
Zoë Sharp
&
Andrew Lownie
