From Library Journal
Though the late novelist had tried narrative verse before (in Moses, 1976), this strictly metered tale of a footloose Irish rake and his ennui-ridden offspring initially surprises but ultimately unravels. In cleverly?often ribaldly?rhymed ottava rima, Burgess (A Clockwork Orange) follows the escapades of Michael Byrne ("He loved the tuba, trumpets and trombones,/ Which smote his very scrotum with their groans") as he beds his way from post-Great War London to Nazi Germany and beyond, leaving a series of wives, lovers, children, film scores, and garish erotic paintings in his wake. The saga romps along comically a la Tom Jones for a third of its length but takes a grim, enervating turn when the narrative flashes forward to the 1990s and bogs down in the dispiriting neuroses of Byrne's twin children, Tom and Tim: one castrated, the other a priest. Though it continues to amuse in a barbed, wise-guy professorial way, Burgess's work eventually descends into pure cartoon, a linguistically fascinating but imbalanced farce.?Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The Atlantic Monthly, Phoebe-Lou Adams
The late Anthony Burgess, a man of many talents and many books, did not leave quietly. His last work is this novel in ottava rima, frankly descended from Don Juan. Where Byron's Donny Johnny was a hapless wanderer through a corrupt and hypocritical society, Burgess's Byrne is "a lecherous defective dreamer" resembling someone in Homer called Margites. "Him the gods / Had not made skilled in craft or good in Greek. / He failed in every art." Byrne is the artist as predatory parasite. His musical compositions are hissed. His painting exhibition is closed down by the police ("The gallery was full of ladies fainting"). His reliable area of success is the bedroom--preferably one belonging to a rich widow with an itch to support the arts, although "to give Byrne his due, he was a maker, / A natural father far more than a wencher." Even his versifying biographer may be one of his scattered, multiracial offspring. Byrne is last seen in Marrakesh, on the run from a bigamy charge, discredited for cooperation with the Nazis, introducing "'My boys. / I prefer women, but these make less noise.'" The novel's second half concerns some of Byrne's offspring and their ludicrous attempt to rehabilitate the paternal reputation. It is as learned, witty, and wildly rhymed as the first half, and bloodies sacred cows with similar energy. If Burgess's satire has a single target, it is those excesses of avant-garde modernism that have led to what he considered dead ends. Byrne sees his proposed biography as "a cautionary tale." It is, but a vastly amusing, sparkling, stimulating variation on that dreary genre.


The New York Times Book Review, Dana Gioia
[Byrne is] so fresh, funny and inventive that it ranks among his finest creations.


From Kirkus Reviews
The prolific (over 50 books) and protean Burgess (191793), author of such amazingly varied fictions as Enderby (1967), Napoleon Symphony (1974), and A Dead Man in Deptford (1995), left this rambunctious ``novel in verse'' completed at his death. Borrowing both Byron's ottava rima and the nine-line stanza Spenser employed in The Faerie Queen (and throwing in a few sonnets for good measure), Burgess's anonymous narrator celebrates and regrets the gluttonous life indulged by his Falstaffian subject--an Irish Don Juan if there ever was one. The eponymous Michael Byrne achieves fame as artist, composer, and cocksman as he beds willing women and fathers disgruntled children, surviving political and erotic dangers in Hitler's Germany before disappearing into the Far East, and legend. The ``fruits of his insemination'' pursue their own dreams and flee their own demons (one is a priest, another author apocalyptic reunion with their Aged (and Unregenerate) Parent. Punk terrorists and Muslim fanatics bent on dishonoring Dante Alighieri also join in this word-drunk romp, which is distinguished by literally dozens of ingeniously brilliant comic rhymes: SS-men boozily strutting their stuff express ``the joy of being drunk and Aryan./Though Hitler was a teetotalitarian,'' and an enlightened defense of the maligned Albert Einstein becomes ``How the hell has his Jewishness impaired/The formula E=Mc2?'' It isn't easy to stop quoting. Surely, somewhere Byron is rolling over in his grave. Laughing. It's heartening to learn from this wonder-filled book that, right up to the end of his life, the invaluable Burgess continued to enjoy writing as few writers have ever done. This is a swan song like no other, and one of the most delightful books of the decade. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

When Anthony Burgess died in 1993 he left the complete Byrne, a novel in epic verse. This is the first American publication. Byrne tells the astonishing story of an Irish artist who, in the early years of this century, goes rapidly to the bad, bedding and abandoning women everywhere, debasing his talents as a composer and painter, and finally ending up within Hitler's Third Reich, at which point he vanishes. After his disappearance, the story passes to his twin sons, one a doubting priest, the other suffering from a debilitating disease, who move across the troubled face of contemporary Europe before encountering their father in one final apocalyptic confrontation.

FROM THE CRITICS

Dana Gioia - The New York Times Book Review

. . .[G]enuinely astonishing — a complex dark comedy.

Atlantic Monthly

Vastly amusing, sparkling, stimulating . . . learned, witty, and wildly rhymed.

Publishers Weekly

Burgess, who died in 1993, was one of the most multitalented writers of the century (his works ranging from A Clockwork Orange through A Dead Man in Deptford), a man who surprised us with each new book. And this, his final work, completed only months before his death and at last appearing here thanks to the ever-enterprising Carroll & Graf, is one of the biggest such surprises. It's a novel in epic verse, no less, exhibiting the full range of Burgess' formidable wit, learning, linguistic skills and familiarity with every corner of contemporary culture. His hero, or at least his subject, who has apparently paid the author to tell his tale in ottava rima, is an Irish artist born around the turn of the century who is at once a composer of some skill (like Burgess himself), an artist of scurrilously pornographic paintings and a notable lecher. In the course of his odd career, having fathered a number of children, Byrne disappears into Nazi Germany and later resurfaces (perhaps) in a corner of Africa. In the second half of the saga, several of Byrne's children, twins Tom and Tim (an academic lecturer and a failed priest, respectively) and faded, TV-gaping Dorothy, are invited by a mysterious message to hear Byrne's will; and, in an amazing purgatorial scene, they learn to move beyond him for the sake of their own lives. Burgess brings it all off with a stunning mixture of rhetorical and poetic fireworks, wide-ranging vernacular speech and some incredibly ingenious rhymes. He ruefully ruminates: 'Why choose this agony of versifying/ Instead of tapping journalistic prose?/ Call it a tribute to a craft that's dying,/ Call it a harmless hobby. Art, God knows,/ Doesn't come into it.' But it does, of course, and Byrne is an endlessly stimulating, cherishable memento from a writer whose soaring imagination, capacious mind and Voltairian skepticism adorned his age.

Library Journal

Though the late novelist had tried narrative verse before (Moses), this strictly metered tale of a footloose Irish rake and his ennui-ridden offspring initially surprises but ultimately unravels. In cleverly, often ribaldly rhymed ottava rima, Burgess (A Clockwork Orange) follows the escapades of Michael Byrne ('He loved the tuba, trumpets and trombones,/ Which smote his very scrotum with their groans") as he beds his way from post-Great War London to Nazi Germany and beyond, leaving a series of wives, lovers, children, film scores, and garish erotic paintings in his wake. The saga romps along comically a la Tom Jones for a third of its length but takes a grim, enervating turn when the narrative flashes forward to the 1990s and bogs down in the dispiriting neuroses of Byrne's twin children, Tom and Tim: one castrated, the other a priest. Though it continues to amuse in a barbed, wise-guy professorial way, Burgess's work eventually descends into pure cartoon, a linguistically fascinating but imbalanced farce. Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, N.Y.

Sunday Times (London)