The Eve of Saint Venus

✍ Scribed by Burgess, Anthony

• Book ID: 100557891
• Publisher: Norton
• Year: 1981
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 418 KB
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

Here is a midsummer night’s dream of a novel, Anthony Burgess in a mood of comic whimsy.

At the rambling Gothic mansion of Sir Benjamin Drayton, the preparations are in full swing for his only daughter's marriage. The cake is ready for cutting; the champagne aches to be uncorked; the baronet is ready to start the toasts. But corruption lurks in the wings, and plans are afoot to stop the marriage from ever taking place.

Until, that is, a little intervention from Venus herself adds divine meddling to mortal schemes.

“This romp through a rural English manor and its ritualistic mannerisms is a glittering entertainment, a grab-bag of allusions, images, and rhetorical gems that Burgess (an opulent king of the Queen’s English) profligately casts away like mere baubles. . . . [His] verbal and dramatic alchemy turns the dross of caricature inscribed on the pedestal of an engaging fable. Sensuous, irreverent, erudite. . . . An epithalamium to the sacred, happy marriage of language and literature.” ― Saturday Review

This fascinating early work by Anthony Burgess is a delightful fantasy, blending classical myth and farce. Displaying a high degree of verbal ingenuity and intelligence, Burgess effortlessly plays with ideas to create a riotous comedy that is ultimately a celebration of love and marriage. Ambrose and Diana are to be married. Diana, however, is having last-minute doubts fuelled by her feminist friend and bridesmaid, Julia, while Ambrose inadvertently becomes engaged to the goddess Venus, who has taken possession of the wedding ring. These obstacles present the first in a farcical series of challenges-not only to the impending wedding, but also to the most dearly held preconceptions of Ambrose, Diana, and their wedding guests.