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Tremor of Intent
Denis Hillier is an aging British agent based in Yugoslavia. His old school friend Roper has defected to the USSR to become one of the evil empire's great scientific minds. Hillier must bring Roper back to England or risk losing his fat retirement bonus. As thoughtful as it is funny, this morality tale of a Secret Service gone mad features sex, gluttony, violence, treacher...more
Paperback, 272 pages
Published
July 1st 2004
by W. W. Norton & Company
(first published 1966)
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I think this is supposed to be a satire of James Bond type of novels. The blurbs on the book make it sound sincere though. I never read any of the James Bond books, or any of the real spy novelists so maybe what I think is satire is actually how it is done. Does James Bond fuck teenage and pre-teenage girls? Do his villains sodomize 13 year old boys?
Probably my least favorite Burgess novel so far, but still good enough in it's non-spy / children fucking parts to be interesting....more
Probably my least favorite Burgess novel so far, but still good enough in it's non-spy / children fucking parts to be interesting....more
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Anthony Burgess is one of my favorite writers. He wrestles in public with the seamiest of demons, and his style is superb: at once impeccably literate and self-mocking.
Tremor of Intent is an oddity in the Burgess canon, a short pastiche of Ian Fleming's work with a hefty dose of Le Carré thrown in for good measure. A Cold War spy goes on a mission that involves eating contests, statutory rape, and various other unsavory details. The overall impact of the book is slow-burning: you ...more
Tremor of Intent is an oddity in the Burgess canon, a short pastiche of Ian Fleming's work with a hefty dose of Le Carré thrown in for good measure. A Cold War spy goes on a mission that involves eating contests, statutory rape, and various other unsavory details. The overall impact of the book is slow-burning: you ...more
Anthony Burgess is the master of writing flawed, some might even say horrible, protagonists. Alex (from A Clockwork Orange) comes to mind first, of course, but there's also the eponymous character from Burgess's The Complete Enderby series, and then Hillier, from Tremor of Intent.
Published in 1966, this is a Cold War spy novel in which the spy, Hillier, is nothing at all like James Bond. I wouldn't go so far as to call this a parody of Ian Fleming's novels, because there's a lot mor...more
Published in 1966, this is a Cold War spy novel in which the spy, Hillier, is nothing at all like James Bond. I wouldn't go so far as to call this a parody of Ian Fleming's novels, because there's a lot mor...more
From the author of Clockwork Orange, this spy novel takes place aboard an ocean liner and throughout Europe. I expected a much grittier, down and dirty story. Rather fun while reading, but entirely forgettable
One of several of Burgess’s Cold War preoccupied novels. It was written during the period he believed he was dying and cranked out 10 books as a life insurance policy for his wife. In it our spy is no 007 of the silver screen. He is haunted by experiences from WWII cleaning up after the Nazis. A spy by default because of a youthful interest in Russian, he believes he has come to terms with his position at the end of a long and infamous career. One last mission forces him to reconcile the pa...more
What a strange book, encompassing everything from English Catholicism to an eating competition. Funny, enjoyable, weird, and unpredictable.
easily my new favorite book ever. a glorious spree of sin and vulgarity in the package of a satirical spy novel. this book has everything, sex, racism, heavy drinking, luxury smoking, and gorging. it's awesome. get it. read it. thank me later.
Steven Klotz
marked it as not-yet-read
Tremor of intent by anthony burgess
Anthony Burgess is so much more than A Clockwork Orange. This book is about a double-agent spy who travels to Russia, discovers that almost everyone is some variation of a double-agent spy, and learns that the only true evil is neutrality. I'm inclined to agree.
I enjoyed this book much more than I possibly could have imagined. I've never been much into spy novels, until now.
decent spy garbage... if only for the cruise ship roman gorging scene with a well-mannered villain.
couldnt finish it. poor writing with unlikable characters.
"He was becoming both full and empty at the same time"
Awesome! I do love this man.
Aj
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Anthony Burgess was a British novelist, critic and composer. He was also a librettist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, travel writer, broadcaster, translator, linguist and educationalist. Born in Manchester, he lived for long periods in Southeast Asia, the USA and Mediterranean Europe as well as in England. His fiction includes the Malayan trilogy (The Long Day Wanes) on the dying days o...more
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“The scientific approach to life is not necessarily appropriate to states of visceral anguish.”
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