The Black Prince by Adam Roberts (adapted from an original script by Anthony Burgess)

Killing makes for a dysentery of
the soul, and I had had enough of it.

As ever, when referring to a book purchased through crowd-funding publishers Unbound I can’t help but stick a plug for their super work right at the beginning.

It’s super, their work.

Own-trumpet-blowing-klaxxon, I have supported 25 of their various projects (26 if we include the one that sadly didn’t make it) and I implore anyone reading this to check them out and bung a few quid their way in support of some frankly excellent words which would never have found paper otherwise – very definitely liberating ideas.

A case in point – The Black Prince, from an original script idea and screenplay by Anthony Burgess, the originator of Ultra-violence and liberal thrower-around of stereotypical female characters, made flesh by science fiction and parody author Adam Roberts.

Whodathunkit?

Having read only the one Burgess novel (yes, the one every bugger’s read) I can’t tell if Roberts does a good job of writing in Burgess’s voice and style or fails abjectly. I don’t know if it’s true to the original concept. And, honestly, I don’t know if I know if it works.

It’s a weird one, I won’t lie. A queasy read in places, it gave me a bit of a headache at first, with its multiple viewpoints, narrators and narrative devices. He/they make use of screaming newsreels, at one point a dog, and there’s blood and gore and shit and illness on every page. We’re treated to some ultra-violent battle and victory scenes, dazed combatants with ears ringing and armour pierced staggering about, Welsh infantry taking the piss out of everyone, stabbing corpses and stealing loot; there are some frankly gut-churning descriptions of dysentery and plague, notably the suffering of the titular prince; and there are some soaring-minds-eye passages from female characters gifted with The Sight (my capitalization). I got to grips with it quickly, however, perhaps owing to the reader training I’ve undergone through my stubborn and frankly sadistic insistence on loving writers with modernity (and post-modernity) on their minds, like Will Self and my favourite Virginian, John Barth. It came quickly into a sharper focus with every page and I verily tore through the lot in a savage glut of enjoyment.

In truth, I had no interest in the Black Prince, Edward of Woodstock, who thrashed merrily around la belle paye in the 14^th century and died of his illnesses before he could be crowned king. I did, however, have a lot of interest in the astonishing series of essays that Roberts provides, one on each of the 33 books that Burgess wrote, and on collecting some of Burgess’s prodigious classical music output* – he considered himself as much a composer as a writer** and released somewhere in the region of 250 pieces of music. I received both as a result of pledging for the book at a higher level. They do that sort of thing at Unbound you know. But if you were interested in a gripping story of battle and conquest with a bit of history chucked in, and don’t mind the odd torture scene and pantaloon-soiling, you could do a whole lot worse.

*Caveat emptor – if you like recorder concertos then lucky you. If, like every sane person on the planet, you don’t, give the second CD below a fucking wide berth.

**Legend has it that he began writing in earnest, in order to leave behind an estate for his wife, after being told he had inoperable brain cancer and would be dead in a year, sometime around 1958-1961. Funnily enough, he lived until February 1997…

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