ABSTRACT
Easily one of the twentieth century's most prolific authors, and arguably one of its best, Burgess was also an active composer, penning operas, musicals, three symphonies, concerti for violin and for piano, and many chamber works. Napoleon Symphony is an astounding achievement on many levels. However, it fails as a biography or a biographical novel, if to be such a work means being hinged upon a chronology. This book does not begin with a birth, it does not end with death, and it contains no narrative of the famous general's childhood or young adulthood. Napoleon Symphony, like Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, has an apparently random sequence of action, feeling, and expression actually directed by the logic of intellectually ordered structures based on music and myth. Burgess fills the last chapter with parodies of English writers that break down what sense of continuity of voice or narrative the novel had maintained up until then.
