In keeping with a text purporting to be an updating of, or reaction to, Orwell’s dystopia, Burgess of course could not resist introducing a linguistic invention in response to Orwell’s famous invention of Newspeak. Alternatively, the word more likely signifies the Arabic for furious – مشاكس, which is in keeping with the plot of the novel, which features an attempted Arabic Islamic overthrow of Britain. It has been suggested elsewhere that this slang was perhaps based on Hindi, but if ‘mashak’, the Hindi for leather waterskin or mosquito, was intended, this makes little obvious sense. ‘You out of a job? Union mashaki? You antistate?’ The kumina leader, black with an Aryan profile, pulled out a pack of Savuke Finns and said: ‘You want a cank?’ These underground-educated gangs, who are familiar with Latin and ancient Greek, speak in an in-group anti-language, using a macaronic mix of English and Arabic: Curiously, and perhaps as a nod to the increasingly multicultural nature of 1970s Britain, Burgess calls them Kumina gangs, “kumi na” being the Swahili equivalent to the English suffix -teen, just as Nadsat is in Russian. Sweetly, they arrange underground classes in Latin to keep culture and education alive as civilisation decays. In this scenario, however, they are positive agents of subversive change rather than the violent agents of chaos we are familiar with from A Clockwork Orange. In this Burgessian version of Orwell’s dystopia, we find a revisioning of Alex and his gang of droogs, curiously enough. It is, therefore, very much the vision of an expatriate who was not living and had not lived in Britain for quite some time, and was reliant upon newspaper reports for his perspective on the nation. In it, Britain is Tucland, a failing state dominated by heavyhanded union leaders and the infiltration of Arab money.
1985 ANTHONY BURGESS REVIEW UPDATE
One section is fiction, an attempt by Burgess to update Orwell’s dystopian vision to the 1970s.
This rather odd book is made up of a number of sections, including a dialogue between two aspects of Burgess himself. In 1978, Burgess published what can best be described as a tribute to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, entitled 1985. Getting lingthusiastic about translation.Anthony Burgess’s other invented languages.Anthony Burgess’s other invented languages, Part 2 – The Sixties, Shakespeare and Strine.Anthony Burgess’s other invented languages Part 3: The Riddle of Sicily in the Caribbean.Anthony Burgess’s other invented languages Part 4: The Seventies, Sophocles, and Shocking Sonnets.Anthony Burgess’s other invented languages Part 5: Rewriting the Bible.Anthony Burgess’s other invented languages Part 6: Orwell and the Workers.Anthony Burgess’s other invented languages Part 7: Paleolinguistics and Proto-Indo-European.Anthony Burgess’s other invented languages Part 8: Macaronic Muggers and Nazi Newspeak.Three versions of Nadsat: English, French & Spanish.‘Cityspeak’ in Blade Runner: The talk of the town.
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