It’s never flowery or ornate, but it’s often powerful. While there’s definitely a learning curve, it’s not terribly steep, and once you settle into the style, you’re in for some absolutely beautiful language, especially concerning Shakespeare’s desire for a dark lady and how the abstract fantasy of it doesn’t quite match up with the reality of it–his dark goddess is always described as “golden”. It’s brimming with imagery, brusque, and poetic, and, wonderfully, it works. But while the focus is on Shakespeare’s love life and how it relates to his plays, the novel also focuses on, by not mentioning the plays much, the ordinary life of an extraordinary genius.įrom the first page, you realize that Nothing Like the Sun is one of those novels a novel whose style takes a while to get used to. Naturally, Burgess spends considerable time on Shakespeare’s relationships with the Dark Lady and Fair Youth of Shakespeare’s sonnets, rendered here as Fatimah, a woman of color from the East Indies, and Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton. Nothing Like the Sun’s subtitle is A story of Shakespeare’s Love-life, and so it is–it follows Shakespeare, rendered here as WS, from a young man struck by the image of a dark goddess to an man wasting away from syphilis.
When I came back from fall break and realized I hadn’t even started it yet (it was either that or my economics textbook, people!), I picked it up without much ceremony or knowing much about it–I knew Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange, which I’ll probably never read, and that it, in some fashion, dealt with race and Shakespeare. Naturally, in my Race in Shakespeare class, we read a lot of plays, but there is one novel on the syllabus–Anthony Burgess’ Nothing Like the Sun.
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