It's time for Part Seven of my latest Tale for Our Time: The Fixed Period, with Anthony Trollope venturing from Barsetshire into a post-Britannic dystopia in the South Pacific.
Tom Osterman, a First Month Founding Member of The Mark Steyn Club writes from Maryland:
I'm enjoying this Tale which, like Greenmantle, I never knew existed. But you might want to have a look at The Wanting Seed by THAT Anthony Burgess.
Oh, I'm very familiar with The Wanting Seed, Tom. The late Mr Burgess was a colleague of mine in the early days of The Independent, back when it was full of good writing rather than being, as it is now, a pathetic dustbin of twelve-year-old prose-plonkers looking for Twitter clicks. As a constant composer and occasional librettist, Burgess was more interested in my beat (musical comedy) than Clockwork Orange fans might expect, and we occasionally discussed that subject and others. The Wanting Seed is most interesting, given the year of publication (1962), for the notion of a state that encourages homosexuality to reduce procreation. As Steyn Clubber Kate Smyth has observed, we're now taking it to the next level: putting "trans" kids on puberty blockers that leave you infertile if you should chance to change your mind.
In tonight's episode, President Neverbend discovers that his son Jack is a rather good cricketer:
We had a wonderful cricket club in Gladstonopolis, and Britannula had challenged the English cricketers to come and play on the Little Christchurch ground, which they declared to be the only cricket ground as yet prepared on the face of the earth which had all the accomplishments possible for the due prosecution of the game. Now Jack, though very young, was captain of the club, and devoted much more of his time to that occupation than to his more legitimate business...
Alas and alack for the President of Britannula, his son is about to set aside the thwack of leather on willow for the rather more primal sport of savaging his father over the Fixed Period. And, for many other citizens of Mr Neverbend's republic, terminating chaps who don't wish to be terminated offends against their sense of fair play.
(Anthony Burgess, by the way, loathed republics, almost as much as he loathed Salman Rushdie and Jimmy Savile.)
Members of The Mark Steyn Club can listen to me read Part Seven of our tale simply by clicking here and logging-in. And, if you're playing catch-up on The Fixed Parade, you can start fresh with Part One and have a good old binge-listen here.
Please join me tomorrow, Sunday, for the latest audio edition of my Song of the Week on Serenade Radio live around the world at 5.30pm UK time - that's 12.30pm North American Eastern.
If you'd like to join Tom in The Mark Steyn Club, we'd love to have you along for our fifth season. So please click here for more info - and don't forget, for fellow fans of classic fiction and/or poetry, our Steyn Club Gift Membership.
