ANY OLD IRON
by Anthony Burgess
Random House; 368 pages; $19.95
If one of pop lit's earnest plonkers had written this clumsy, lively, thoroughly entertaining family saga of war and romance, no reader would have puzzled over deep currents that seem unaccountably shallow. Anthony Burgess, however, is one of literature's certified mandarins, known as an explicator of Ulysses (Re Joyce), a postapocalyptic moralist (A Clockwork Orange), and a scholar showily at home in a double handful of ancient and modern languages. He wigwags strenuously at the outset of this new novel that primal, mythic stuff is ahead -- ancient tales threading...
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