Beds in the East
Encyclopedia
Beds in the East is the third novel in Anthony Burgess
's Malayan Trilogy The Long Day Wanes
. It was published in 1959.
The title is taken from a line spoken by Mark Antony in Antony and Cleopatra
, act 2, scene 6: "The beds i' the east are soft; and thanks to you,/That call'd me timelier than my purpose hither;/For I have gain'd by 't."
Anthony Burgess
John Burgess Wilson – who published under the pen name Anthony Burgess – was an English author, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic. The dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange is Burgess's most famous novel, though he dismissed it as one of his lesser works...
's Malayan Trilogy The Long Day Wanes
The Long Day Wanes
The Long Day Wanes: A Malayan Trilogy, also published as The Malayan Trilogy, is Anthony Burgess's novel cycle about the withdrawal from empire....
. It was published in 1959.
The title is taken from a line spoken by Mark Antony in Antony and Cleopatra
Antony and Cleopatra
Antony and Cleopatra is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written sometime between 1603 and 1607. It was first printed in the First Folio of 1623. The plot is based on Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Lives and follows the relationship between Cleopatra and Mark Antony...
, act 2, scene 6: "The beds i' the east are soft; and thanks to you,/That call'd me timelier than my purpose hither;/For I have gain'd by 't."
Characters
- Victor Crabbe, headmaster and education officer
- Robert Loo, a brilliant boy composer whose musical career Crabbe seeks to further
- Rosemary Michael, an "eminently nubile" Eurasian with "quite considerable capacity for all kinds of sensuous pleasure"
- Tommy Jones, beer salesman. "That's my line. I sell beer all over the East. Thirty years on the job. Three thousand a month and a car allowance and welcome wherever I go."
- Lim Cheng Po, an Anglophile lawyer
- Liversedge, an Australian judge who harbours a secret resentment against the English
- Moneypenny, an anthropologist studying the hill tribes and living in the Malayan jungle. He has lost touch with civilisation to the extent that he believes it is lethal to laugh at butterflies and "now regarded even a lavatory as supererogatory".