A Vision of Battlements By Anthony Burgess

A new edition of Anthony Burgess’s first novel, set in Gibraltar during the Second World War. Loosely based on Virgil’s Aeneid, the book describes the anti-heroic army career of Richard Ennis, a thwarted composer. The introduction and notes describe the publishing history and the autobiographical context of this lost masterpiece.

A Vision of Battlements has many claims on the attention of readers. The setting is Gibraltar, a place rarely visited by other novelists; the theme is not the frustration of a wartime garrison so much as the pain of looking forward to re-building and re-adjustment at the end of the war. But it is also gloriously comic. The hero is Richard Ennis, sergeant and musician. He is a young man of admirable intentions who never seems to hit it off with authority, especially his commanding officer, Major Muir. He lectures on Civics to the troops and, in spite of himself, becomes a popular left-wing hero. He carries on a liaison with a Gibraltarian widow when he should be on parade. He seems to be the instigator of a mutiny. Finally, he is accused by the Christian Brothers of trying to corrupt the young by giving them godless Spanish poetry. In spite of all this he remains an optimist, and he has a great capacity for love. Admirers of Anthony Burgess’s work will find here not simply a typical Burgess hero but an anticipation of the good-hearted rebel of the 1950s.

Written in 1951 and out of print for more than fifty years, Anthony Burgess’s first novel is a lost masterpiece. Drawing on the most recent scholarship, this new edition restores the text of the novel to its original state, and explains its literary, historical and publishing contexts through a new introduction and a detailed set of notes.

A Vision of Battlements is the first novel by the writer and composer Anthony Burgess, who was born in Manchester in 1917. Set in Gibraltar during the Second World War, the book follows the fortunes of Richard Ennis, an army sergeant and incipient composer who dreams of composing great music and building a new cultural world after the end of the war. Following the example of his literary hero, James Joyce, Burgess takes the structure of his book from Virgil’s Aeneid. The result is, like Joyce’s Ulysses, a comic rewriting of a classical epic, whose critique of the Army and the postwar settlement is sharp and assured.

The Irwell Edition is the first publication of Burgess’s forgotten masterpiece since 1965. This new edition includes an introduction and notes by Andrew Biswell, author of a prize-winning biography of Anthony Burgess.