Angers, in the Loire Valley, is a pleasant little town with two modest claims to notice: it is twinned with Wigan, and it houses the Anthony Burgess Center. Such an arrangement might well have pleased Burgess. First, it has an echo of the Catholic Lancashire he bogusly made so much of and fled from, opting like Joyce for silence (well, hardly that), exile and cunning (plenty of that; secondly, it locates him in a Europe far removed from the England where he suffered what he called the ‘malevolence’ of the literary establishment. The rest of his literary remains are scattered, just as promiscuously, in Manchester, Texas and elsewhere.

There is a growing literature about Burgess, and much of it is non-British in origin, which would have pleased his perverse sense of himself as a prophet without honour in his own country. In 2002 we had Roger Lewis’s barmy but brilliant biography, and now along comes Andrew Biswell’s hefty and impressive The Real Life of Anthony Burgess.

It would be unfair to say of almost any book that its most intriguing feature is its title (though this is sometimes true of himself). In this case there are issues to be faced: the real life? and of whom? After reading Lewis, Biswell and others, including Burgess’s own two forays into autobiography-as-fiction, it is increasingly hard to believe that there is a real life, or indeed a real Anthony Burgess. Biswell has drawn on an impressive store of unpublished material and has clearly had a very extensive correspondence with people who knew Burgess in various capacities. His researches provide a wealth of fascinating anecdotal material which does nothing to change – indeed entrenches – our growing sense of Burgess as, in Lewis’s phrase, ‘a genuine fake’.

Did John Anthony Burgess Wilson himself know who he was, or what the real life was? ‘I don’t know what we mean by identity,’ he said. ‘Call me X, call me K. It doesn’t really matter.’ He claimed descent from Bonnie Prince Charlie, and found in his mother’s maiden name Finnegan a fateful link with his hero, Joyce; Jack Wilson, the clown in Shakespeare’s troupe, was also clearly an antecedent, as was an earlier Lancashire martyr, Jack Wilson. He would at times sign letters ‘Anthony/John’ or use multiple variations of ‘Wilson’ and ‘Burgess’. He said memorably that his first and last names ‘show the carapace of my nominal shrimp, the head and tail I pull off to disclose the soft edible body’. Kingsley Amis was not alone in finding this impenetrably cryptic, and settled for calling him ‘John’. To others he was ‘Antonio’, and to himself he was sometimes ‘Joseph Kell’ – as Anthony Burgess, he reviewed his own novel published under that pseudonym. When he was learning Russian, one of the many languages in which he claimed some moot competence, he inscribed the flyleaf of his bilingual dictionary ‘Ivan Wilson’. This unstable sense of identity was carried into his death. The Burgess gravestone in the hills above Monaco (still and ever an exile) is engraved with the motto ABBA ABBA, an endless circularity of Anthony Burgess and the cry of Christ crucified.

It wouldn’t be quite right to call him a liar as he so clearly believed the lies he told, gathering them into what he called his ‘private mythology’. So: as a child he woke up in his cot to find his mother and sister dead in the same room; his first wife was raped in a wartime blackout by American soldiers; he sold nylon frocks on the Russian black market; he fathered a son (Paolo-Andrea Wilson, who somehow turned into a kilt-wearing Scot)… None of these stories stands up, and there are many more. In this sense, he recalls that other prolific great liar of English fiction, Ford Madox Ford, who also had trouble in knowing what to call himself. For all his moans about being neglected, Burgess was happy to repeat his patter, with ever more colourful variations, as a stalwart of the chat-show circuit (‘Who is Terry Wogan?’), like an old-style vaudevillian touring the halls.

Inexperienced novelists sometimes give themselves away by writing their own experience transparently into their work. The young Burgess fell foul of this weakness to the extent of twice finding himself in trouble for libel, and his memoirs sometimes have to rely on fictitious names. As he went on, he reversed the process by increasingly importing episodes from his novels into accounts of his life. The story most people know is the one about the inoperable brain tumour that he survived for forty years (I know at least four versions of it); topping this off nicely, he claims he wrote five novels in the final year he was allowed in order to provide for his prospective widow, though at least two of them had been written years before. His novel The Doctor is Sick is partly an account of the treatment he received after the terminal diagnosis. The central character flees the hospital and is chased by his doctor. In Burgess’s supposedly non-fictional account he was pursued by Dr Roger Bannister, no less; the doctor in the novel is called ‘Railton’ (geddit?), but Bannister, interviewed by Biswell, is properly discreet about his patient’s condition.

In You’ve Had Your Time (‘Being the Second Part of the Confessions of…’) he describes the start of his final movement into exile: ‘There had been altogether too much pretence and lying in my literary career’ (including some queries about his sexuality). Well, you said it, John, Joseph, Mr Wilson, Antonio Borghese – come out, come out, whoever you are.

None of this can or should undermine Burgess’s achievement as a novelist and literary journalist. His output was phenomenally large and for the most part of high quality. He wasted too much time on trashy but lucrative TV and film treatments, and even as a Burgess enthusiast I confess to finding MF and Napoleon Symphony unreadable. But A Clockwork Orange (always an irritant to him, though it earned enough to warrant a different kind of exile) and Earthly Powers should secure his reputation.

Though under-edited and occasionally repetitive, Biswell’s book is lively and entertaining. Colloquialisms such as ‘wrecked’, ‘plastered’ and ‘piss-artist’, to describe Burgess’s and his first wife’s drinking habits sound a jarring note, but ‘charlatan and bullshitter’ (quoted from a private letter) sounds about right. The use of Roman Catholic terms is a bit shaky.

Dr Johnson had his Boswell, and now Burgess has his Biswell, who has done his work so thoroughly that one cannot easily imagine the need for another such study for many years to come. With luck this book will help to revive what seems to be a flagging market. It often happens with writers that when they die they disappear in more senses than one. My local Waterstone’s, in a large university city, has two yellowing copies of A Clockwork Orange, and that’s it – not much of a showing for a man with sixty-odd titles to his name.

But Burgess fans need not despair: there is, presumably, no book lack in Angers.