Novel: Tremor of Intent

Overview
Anthony Burgess’s Tremor of Intent (1966), subtitled an essay in the abominable, is a Cold War spy novel that doubles as a moral allegory and a parody of espionage fiction. It follows Denis Hillier, an educated, Catholic Englishman turned operative, who is sent to retrieve, failing that, to silence, his brilliant school friend, the scientist Roper, now in the Eastern Bloc. Burgess uses the apparatus of a thriller, ships, honey traps, interrogations, betrayals, to anatomize conscience, appetite, and the corrupt symmetries of East and West, while mischievously lampooning both the suavely violent Bond school and the gray moral quagmire of le Carré.

Plot
Hillier’s mission begins on a Mediterranean cruise whose ports lead toward the Iron Curtain. The ship is a floating theater where motives collide under the cover of leisure. Hillier observes, manipulates, and is in turn manipulated, meeting figures who seem designed to test his resolve and his scruples. Chief among them is Theodorescu, a gargantuan gourmet and possible Eastern agent, whose epic appetite turns meals into comic-grotesque set pieces and whose talk nudges Hillier toward a recognition of espionage as a diet of coercion and deceit. There is also a seductress who may be working for any side, and a pious presence that presses Hillier’s religious vocabulary of sin, intention, and guilt.

The cruise ends; the real work begins in a drab, watchful city beyond the West’s perimeter, where Hillier finally reaches Roper. Their reunion is not a triumph of friendship but a debate staged in shadow: science pressed into ideological service, betrayal explained as higher loyalty, and the question of whether conscience can survive systems that claim to own it. Roper may be an idealist, a traitor, a pawn, or all three. Hillier’s orders and his personal desire to save the boy he once knew no longer align. Surveillance tightens, loyalties shift, and the mission collapses into a choice between botched rescue and sanctioned murder.

Burgess steers to an ending laced with bitter irony. The gears of state grind finer than private intentions; information is traded for human lives, and even victory tastes rancid. Hillier completes his task in a sense, but with little to claim beyond a sharpened awareness that the West he serves mirrors the East he opposes, and that his own soul has been recruited as thoroughly as his body.

Form and Style
The novel splices modes: brisk, gadgeted caper; confessional journal; high-spirited pastiche; and philosophical dialogue. Burgess’s diction swerves from demotic to Latinate, larding the grotesque with gourmet detail and spiking action with theological asides. The shipboard chapters are carnivalesque, the Eastern scenes wintry and claustrophobic, and the interleaved reflections keep tugging the thriller back toward metaphysical inquiry.

Themes
Burgess probes intention versus act, a core concern in Catholic moral thought: whether a sin or a virtue lies in what one does or why one does it. Appetite, figured through Theodorescu’s feasts and through sexual and professional temptations, becomes an emblem of modernity’s hungers. Friendship and betrayal are weighed against systems that exploit both. The Cold War emerges as a mirror hall where enemies adopt each other’s methods, and the spy, charged with pure purpose, becomes the very instrument of corruption he claims to resist.

Significance
Tremor of Intent is Burgess’s most explicit engagement with the spy genre, a wickedly erudite send-up that refuses to dispense with excitement even as it exposes the genre’s consolations. It stands as a mid-century reckoning with power and conscience, asking whether any clean intention can survive the tremor that runs through a compromised age.