You've Had Your Time

This is the second part of Anthony Burgess's confessions, the first volume of which was entitled "Little Wilson and Big God". The narratvie begins in 1959, with the author's return to England from Brunei and, after the explosion of a prognosis which gave him a year to live, the start of a professional writing career which is still in gaudy flower. It ends, somewhat arbitrarily, in 1983 with the centenary celebrations of James Joyce's birth, which prompt certain conclusions about the relationship between literature and life. The life depicted here is that of a man desperate to earn a living through writing. The writing comprises all the media, including film, and the reader will learn about cinematic enterprises that succeeded and failed, novels the critics snarled at, journalism that scandalised the morally scrupulous. A strange marriage ends with the cirrhosis of the wife, a second marriage brings a triumphant rebirth of sex, creative energy and foreign travel, as well as an illegitimate fatherhood made legitimate.