This section relies too much on references to primary sources. What I saw in the legend was the possibility of composing a contemporary realistic novel in which all the structural desiderata were fulfilled without the uninstructed reader's needing to know or care." Reception The brother and sister escape when he unwittingly answers the riddles correctly, and they fly into the heavens, there to become the sun and moon in eclipse. But even after the marriage the witch is not quite convinced, so she sets her talking owls to ask the pseudo-son riddles: if he gives the right answers, as Oedipus did to the Sphinx, she will know that he has committed the unpardonable sin and hence is not her son. The witch has her suspicions, which can be allayed only by the boy's marrying his own sister: no one would be so mad as to fracture the incest taboo. She looks for her lost son, now buried, and the brother has to pretend to be that son. He kills the double, only to discover that he was the son of a very powerful witch who has taught owls to talk. Burgess in his memoir recounts the Algonquin myth in which "a boy finds his sister being sexually assaulted by his own double. The second source of inspiration was The Scope of Anthropology by Claude Lévi-Strauss. The first was a facetious remark made by William Conrad, about "putting on a black Oedipus and calling it Mother-Fucker."
Inspiration īurgess in his memoir You've Had Your Time gives two sources of inspiration for the novel. Unspeakable crimes of blood and lust are perpetrated against both before Miles, solving the final riddle, wakes-like Oedipus to find himself a willing victim of the machinations of dynastic destiny.
1985 ANTHONY BURGESS QUOTES SERIES
In the streets of Castita's capital, gay with a religious festival, a series of bizarre revelations await him: his obscene double, the son of a circus sorceress Aderyn the Bird Queen, and a sister-plump fellow offspring of his father's incestuous union. His destination: the shrine of Sib Legeru, Castitian poet and painter. Most interesting of all I'm due tonight to be married by a circus clown to my own sister.' Almost twenty-one, a college throw-out, Miles Faber embarks on a defiant pilgrimage across the Caribbean. I've spent some hours in prison, I've discovered the works of an unknown superlative artist in a garden shed and I've been shot at by a riddling lion-faced expert on Bishop Berkeley. In two days in a strange country I've acquired a mother in the form of a Welsh-speaking Bird Queen who scares me. From the blurb of Cape's first edition: 'The situation as far as I'm concerned,' says the young-narrator-hero of MF, 'is an interesting one.
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