While the novels written by Anthony Burgess contained (at times) deplorable violence, they also conveyed his points accurately and intelligently. For example, in A Clockwork Orange, a form of teenage dialect (nadstat) was used to downplay the actual violent crimes being committed while still shocking the educated reader (Malafry 1). Burgess's novels are entertaining, shocking and amusing, but, more importantly, they "revel ever deepening shades of meaning as they are reread, meanings that challenge the imagination as they force re

"I am tired of categories, of divisions, of opposites. Good, evil; male, female; positive, negative. That they interpenetrate is no real palliative, no ointment for the cut. What I seek is the continuum, the merging. Europe is for all Manichees, Russia has becomes the most European of them all" (Coale 65)

Similar Religious messages about government and the faults and flaws therein can be found in Burgess's Orwellian tale The Wanting Seed. A. De Vitis actually compares the condition of England in The Wanting Seed to what was portrayed in Orwell's 1984. The nation is a nightmare, "representing how controlling the state is; forcing everyone to live regimented lives" (124). The novel presents a horrifying picture of life in a future world freed of war but terribly overpopulated.

The Manichean "alternation of aimless spasmodic action and sheer paralysis, the craving for exotic sauces this becoming cognate with a sacred huddling into the dusty dark of the past" describe the depressive cycle of the Paul Hussey, the major character's life (De Vitis 61).

The novel is essentially an antiutopian nightmare that can be read as an answer to and a rejection of the main ideas of psychologist B. F. Skinner. These ideas consisted of reforming criminals by limiting the subjects' freedom of choice to what society termed "goodness." This effort struck Burgess as "most sinful," and his novel is, another other things, an attempt to clarify the issues involved in the use of such methods (Aggler 175).

However, the most Manicheastic of all in this tale is Dr. Tiresias, who proclaims:

Considered by many critics Burgess's masterpiece, Earthly Powers contains two opposite characters that function as outlets for Burgess to express his views on society and religion. In fact, its introductory sentence is hard to outdo: "It was the afternoon of my eight-first birthday," writes Kenneth Toomey, a homosexual novelist-playwright, "and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me" (Burgess Earthly Powers 1). Burgess pits this cynical, pessimistic Toomey against the reform-minded optimistic Don Carlo. The two men constantly quarrel (consistent with Burgess's religious philosophy) over the nature of good and evil, the necessity of man's free will and the mysterious outlines of God's design in a modern universe seemingly intent on denying any possibility of goodness or redemption (Coale 53).

This ambiguous "something else" can be interpreted by several different people to mean several different things, ranging from the very Manichean principles they were written upon to personal metaphors explaining or providing escape from everyday life

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Approximate Word count = 1805
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)