Cannibalism. Sexism. Homosexuality. Totalitarian regime. Religion. How is all this connected, you may ask? All these notions are combined in this novel by the famous author of A Clockwork Orange.

The Wanting Seed (1962) is a dystopian novel about an overpopulated world where a special organization is controlling child birth and does nothing to ensure that newborns stay alive. The story is told from two points of view:
- Tristram - a plodding but conscientious history teacher
- Beatrice-Joanna - his beautiful, but unfaithful wife
Their only child had died and having more kids is forbidden by law.

As in most dystopian stories, by the middle of the book chaos rules the world, most notions are mixed up and the characters eagerly try to find their place in this new system.

The first half of the book is really exciting, intriguing and thought-provoking. However, the second part is rather slow-paced and very confusing, as if the author was trying to fit in all these ideas and action scenes in the few pages he had left, forgetting that there's someone on the other side reading it all. The ending was quite shocking and disappointing. Don't want to spoil it for others, but if you want to discuss the ending, leave your comments below my review or send me a private message. I'm really interested in what others have to say about it.

Nonetheless, this book is worth reading. However, I was impressed by Kallocain (another dystopian novel by a Swedish writer) much more. This book contains many disturbing scenes, so if you're not into reading about issues I mentioned in the beginning, then this book is not for you.

This is very much a future dystopia novel. It takes place in what was once the UK and follows the lives of a married couple, Tristram and Beatrice-Joanna. They are heterosexual couple living in a world where homosexuality and castration are heavily encouraged in order to curb the out of control world population. Breeding is shunned, a social faux pas. As poor crops and government law begin to come down on the people, they change to answer in strange and frightening ways.
It's an interesting take on human response to massive overpopulation. There's a lot of really good commentary on the way people as a whole might respond to global emergency. The story itself isn't difficult to follow, but it moves through phases rather quickly once it gets going and the state of the government seems to change very rapidly. Burgess also uses quite the vocabulary. There were a number of obscure words that not even my dictionary could help me with. Made me feel dumb real fast.

This speculative novel begins with a febrile, starved world, a world groaning under the weight of overpopulation - not the most original idea. It considers what follows from this, which is entirely its own: at the core, the world government's pursuit of a policy, law and culture of sterility in many forms, the literal in the enforcement of homosexual relationships and (he suggests, in turn) the discrimination of heterosexual sex and procreation, to the symbolic - sociopolitical and domestic relations, man reduced to social function and utility, social world reduced to following the ebb and flow of authoritarian mandate, national announcements, the threat of imprisonment. (It is a peculiar interesting premise that is, in the form that it is, it is unlikely to find its way into the mind in contemporary times, much less the written draft or the inked printout.) In its utilitarian greyness, the world is a paler version of Clockwork Orange's.

The 'wanting seed' is economical wordplay, 'wanting' suggesting both yearning and lack. The seed is baldly offspring, the seed of an idea implanted in the novel, seminal beginnings, in the truest sense of the phrase. If this world is limp, colourless and dull as brutalistic post-Soviet architecture and just as morbidly, horrifically, ridiculous in its mass murder cloaked in the mantle of staged battles, its prose and characters are the exact opposite. Beatrice Joanna's (some figure of Dantean Beatrice surely) sensual and wholesome womanly form, a mirror to the unrelenting, glorious fullness of Burgess' prose style, rich oin echoes to novelistic influences and playful with meaning. Burgess suggests and celebrates syntactically the wildness of human nature and the natural vigour of sexual congruence, positing in copulation and manly and womanly desire for each other a rich, primal source of power. Biological reproduction is linked to creation, and artistic plurality in sexual charge lies the core of all art - as one character theorises. Apart from art, the novel is also concerned with theorising cycles of government and civilisation. Coined the Pelphase, Interphase, and Gusphase - the waxing and waning of belief in the goodness of human nature and the ability for self-improvement correlates inversely with the brutality of statecraft. Despite how interesting this all is, there is a moment (perhaps near the cannibalistic plot) where one wonders whether the satirized descent into depravity has all become a bit atrocious and incredible, however since one mustn't underestimate the way civilisations drive themselves into tragic absurdity, perhaps it is not a stretch to imagine this not as satire, too.

For this reader, all this talk about intercourse and art brings to mind Camille Paglia's thesis in Sexual Personae, and here one might pause to wonder about the possibility of what ideas might emerge and be tossed about from a stimulating dinner party conversation between Paglia and Burgess (have they ever met? perhaps? they were both on Buckley's Firing Line). Edit: Not wrong about this. Burgess reviewed this book in "Creatures of decadent light and violent darkness: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson" (April 27, 1990) The Independent. London, England: Independent Print Ltd. p. 19.

Currently reading. Wicked satire by the author of A Clockwork Orange.