The End of the World News: An Entertainment

Overview
Anthony Burgess’s The End of the World News: An Entertainment (1982) is a playful, polyphonic collage that splices together three distinct narratives as if they were segments in a fast-cut broadcast. It presents a Broadway-styled musical biography of Sigmund Freud, a historical novella about Leon Trotsky’s brief exile in New York, and a science‑fiction catastrophe tale about humanity’s evacuation from an impending cosmic collision. The strands do not unite in plot, but their crossfire of images and motifs builds a satirical panorama of modernity: how ideas travel, how power sells itself, and how cultures reinvent themselves when the old world cracks apart.

Structure and Strands
The Freud material is written as a stage show, complete with brassy numbers, patter songs, and recurring refrains. It condenses Freud’s life into scenes that make his theories sing: the consulting room becomes a proscenium; the couch, a prop; the Oedipus complex, a chorus hook. Colleagues and antagonists, Breuer, Jung, skeptics and disciples, step forward for comic and didactic turns, while the book toggles between lampoon and homage. The musical’s showbiz framing lays bare the appetite to turn difficult thought into consumable spectacle, even as Burgess smuggles in brisk précis of psychoanalytic concepts and the anxieties of European modernism.

Running alongside is a portrait of Trotsky in New York on the eve of the Russian Revolution. He arrives in a city of elevated trains, newspaper offices, tenement kitchens, and raucous political clubs, an exile among exiles. Burgess tracks his journalism, speeches, and family life with sardonic warmth, offering quick sketches of American radicals, bemused reporters, and the easy commercial tempo of Manhattan that both fascinates and appalls the visiting revolutionary. News of upheaval in Petrograd interrupts his routine; passports, police, and ships become the machinery of return. The strand is less a hero’s arc than a study in transit, an intellectual between continents, rehearsing a revolution in the key of American bustle.

The third stream is apocalyptic: astronomers confirm a celestial body on a collision course with Earth; governments and corporations improvise a last‑ditch exodus. Burgess imagines bureaucratic muddle, queues and lotteries, pragmatism and panic, and a ruthless triage of who gets a seat. The selected survivors, technicians, artists, children, lift off toward a provisional colony, often figured as Mars, bearing the edited cargo of human culture. Confinement, rationed air, and failing machines press on the settlers, while the old Earth becomes a memory to curate. Language lessons, hymnlike recitations, and makeshift performances become a lifeline, suggesting that what endures after catastrophe is pattern: words, music, myths.

Themes and Motifs
Across all three channels flows the question of what can be saved. Freud’s theories survive as show tunes; Trotsky’s politics refract through American media and the clatter of presses; the evacuees pack civilization into syllabi, archives, and songs. Burgess relishes the grammar of mass communication, headlines, jingles, patter, slogans, showing how the twentieth century translates thought into product. New York functions as emblem and hinge: a place where European exiles land and the world gets reissued, where revolution and entertainment borrow each other’s rhythms.

Style and Effect
The book’s jump‑cut architecture mimics television news, shifting tones from farce to reportage to speculative chronicle. Puns, pastiche, and lyric set pieces test the border between education and entertainment. The narratives never neatly synchronize, but their echoes, patients and audiences, agitators and advertisers, rockets and footlights, create a composite argument: endings are also openings, and modern history, however grave, keeps finding its way to a stage. The final impression is both mordant and buoyant, a cabaret at the edge of catastrophe that insists culture’s forms outlast the worlds that birthed them.