Novel: The Enemy in the Blanket

Overview
Anthony Burgess’s The Enemy in the Blanket, published in 1958, is the second novel of his Malayan Trilogy and follows the British schoolmaster-turned-education officer Victor Crabbe as he is posted from a west-coast town to a remote, ultra-traditional sultanate on Malaya’s east coast during the Emergency. The novel deepens Burgess’s portrait of a late-colonial society riddled with competing authorities, British administrators, Malay royalty, religious courts, Chinese businessmen, and insurgent pressures, while turning the screw on Crabbe’s fraying marriage to his wife, Fenella. Burgess blends comedy of manners with legal satire and cultural anthropology, letting courtrooms, clubs, schools, mosques, and palaces collide in a humid arena of gossip, status, and power.

Plot
Crabbe arrives in the small Islamic state to take up a senior education post, idealistically convinced that schooling can be a neutral, modernizing force. He quickly discovers that curricula, headmasterships, and school contracts are bargaining chips in a web of patronage running from the palace to village prayer halls. The British Adviser plays chess with policy while the Sultan and his courtiers jealously guard prerogatives, and every reform threatens someone’s livelihood or pride.

The book’s central action coalesces around a sensational libel case that splits the state’s fragile consensus. A flamboyant Malay magnate with an English wife sues over a scurrilous pamphlet that impugns his honor, manhood, and religious standing. What begins as a civil action in an Anglo-Malayan court soon entangles the syariah authorities, since marriage, conversion, and sexual reputation cannot be prised apart from religious jurisdiction. Witnesses are paraded, translation becomes a sport, and the law itself turns theatrical as counsel joust over words whose meanings alter across languages and codes.

Crabbe, tangled through acquaintance and office with several participants, is drawn into the proceedings, his testimony and presence used by both sides to legitimize competing narratives of modernity and tradition. Meanwhile Fenella, bored and lonely in a courtly, gossipy town where women’s movements are noticed and judged, drifts toward an affair with a younger European official. Domestic betrayal mirrors political duplicity; the “enemy in the blanket” proves to be both the intimate traitor and the insider who undermines institutions from within.

The verdict satisfies no one. The magnate’s honor is not restored, the religious court asserts itself more strongly, and British prestige shrinks under the glare of its own procedural showmanship. Crabbe’s reforms stall, his marriage deteriorates, and a move becomes inevitable.

Characters and setting
Crabbe remains Burgess’s moral barometer, erudite, compassionate, capable of self-deception. Fenella is rendered with a brittle honesty that refuses simple blame. Around them cluster a sardonic British Adviser, an impressionable palace, opportunistic local officials, sharp-tongued lawyers, and schoolmasters forced to navigate patronage. The east-coast sultanate, never pinned to a single real map, feels specific: riverine, pious, ceremonial, and, beneath the surface, volatile.

Themes and tone
Burgess satirizes colonial administration without absolving its critics, showing how everyone bends principles to convenience. The novel probes law as performance, language as weapon, and marriage as a political unit subject to rumor and jurisdiction. Conversion, identity, and masculinity are examined in a society where honor is communal and privacy fragile. Comic set pieces, clubbable banter, courtroom fireworks, shade into disillusion as idealists meet institutional gravity.

Significance
As the trilogy’s hinge, The Enemy in the Blanket shifts the canvas from schoolroom farce toward institutional critique, preparing the way for the more openly political currents of the final volume. It leaves Crabbe chastened but not cynical, poised between resignation and a stubborn faith in education, even as the structures around him prove resistant to enlightened repair.