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On the broader screen of history, Burgess gets his effects by balancing the horrors of war with some of the absurdities of political power and private weaknesses. Napoleon is at times almost lovable, particularly when he discovers that the people of France are so blinded by the myth of Bonaparte that they do not even recognize him when he chooses to walk the streets as an ordinary citizen. Burgess also locates Napoleon's own blind spots. On drama, for example: "Tragedy must never have chairs on the stage. Tragic characters never sit down." And the Emperor's effort to abolish Europe's old aristocracy and nationalism, to create a unified Europe under the banner of French Enlightenment and Gallic law, failed to take into account the primitive, nearly mystical origins of national identities.
His attitude and policies regarding the German states, for example, actually helped drive the Teutonic princes together. As a result, Napoleon helped lay the foundation for German nationalism and France's conqueror, Bismarck.
Burgess grants Napoleon both genius and idealism, but he has great fun exploring the Emperor's lack of moral sensitivity and aesthetic judgment. As the torch carrier of the Enlightenment, a kind of social engineer who believed man was perfectible through political institutions, Burgess's Napoleon ignores the intransigent nature of evil.
As Beethoven is supposed to have said when he retracted the dedication of "The Eroica," "Held, nein [Hero, no]!"
Burgess, the Christian moralist, appears to agree. His reasons are worked out in a fugue of ideas at the book's end where the exiled, cancerous—perhaps even dead—Napoleon encounters a mysterious female apparition. Since she coldly puts Napoleon in his place, she may well be Clio, the Muse of history.
In any case, she declares that Beethoven's art is more important than Napoleon's military skill—"an art," she unkindly notes, "highly wasteful of its materials." Napoleon, whose mind or spirit at this point is soaring like the last movement of "The Eroica, "appears to get the message: musical forms may reveal divine essences, while his own kinetic life has been shaped by a gargantuan but finite will, whose only form was eventually a form of selfdelusion. Napoleon Symphony is, in some sense, an entertaining and elaborate joke. What the punch line comes down to is the simple fact that even Napoleon thought he was Napoleon. "
R.Z. Sheppard
"Awwk! Awwk!" sings Anthony Burgess in a loud, hoarse baritone. "Those E-flat major chords get the reader awake." Then in deep, funereal tones, quoting from his own book, he continues: "There he lies/ Ensanguinated tyrant/ O bloody, bloody tyrant/ See/ How the sin within/ Doth incarnadine/ His skin/ From the shin to the chin." "Perhaps," he adds, "Knopf should have given away a free record with every copy."