What one most admires in Anthony Burgess is the Balzacian creative energy and virtuosity which enables him to combine scholarship with imaginative fiction. His is a catholicity in the widest sense: his Catholic faith acts as inspiration and focus for dynamic achievement. Recently, writing about contemporary fiction, he regretted that themes and plots were, in the main, limited to the miniaturist canvas of personal relationships (which he cannot be accused of). Burgess thinks big and writes big: he thrashes his words into a gargantuan operatic ensemble of recitatives, arias and choruses. One is hardly surprised that he has composed three symphonies. Appositely perhaps that the second novel of this review should fall within the category of personal relationships rather contemptuously dismissed by Anthony Burgess. I shall come to that later.

The Kingdom of the Wicked, with all its bulk and ballast, is very much a drama of personal relationships, the historical content being Burgess’s orchestral accompaniment and scenery. Mr Burgess takes hold of an immense theme with magnificent mastery, controversially launching his drama with the enigma of the Resurrection, particularly topical an issue with the Bishop of Durham’s recent questioning. Mr Burgess, through his narrator, states his viewpoint very clearly: I will not accept miracles if the rational lies to hand, and I have no proof that Jesus died on the Cross.’ That is Mr Burgess’s initial bomb-shell, and he plunges us into the actuality of what followed, mainly through Paul’s pilgrimage and the roles enacted by Christ’s disciples (all splendidly differentially depicted). It is all here in this incredible story – fact fictionised as fact – almost ciné-verité. One hardly knows which mosaic to praise most, ones like the Jewish community, divided and at odds, themselves as bigoted and cruel as their Roman rulers, with their desperate deeds to preserve the purity of the true faith.

The foulnesses of Imperial Rome of those years (the book’s title is traditionally given to that Empire by the Jews) in the sadism and obscenities of Caligula and Nero, are scenes from the theatre of cruelty (Petronius’s philosophy). Detail and dialogue are breathtakingly vivid: especially remarkable is Mr Burgess’s portrait of Agrippina, Nero’s mother, and the wonderful scenes between them. Mr Burgess’s width of hand is panoramic, and nothing contemporaneous of those years is omitted from this saga: glimpses of conquered Britons, the wholesale massacres, the foul games, the animal baiting, and sexual depravity described in its most virulent excesses.

It would be unfair to reveal Mr Burgess’s somewhat pessimistic finale, except to say that the main protagonists end up in Pompeii. Mention is made of Constantine, the Roman Emperor baptised on his death-bed, the effect of which, in 325, made Christianity Rome’s official religion. I look forward, perhaps, to Anthony Burgess giving us his portrait of this remarkable ruler. Meanwhile The Kingdom of the Wicked is surely his most ambitious novel to date, a pretty certain contender for the 1985 Booker.

Now to Lisa Alther’s Other Women, a novel which, to my mind, has been in some sections of the reviewing circle unfairly and grudgingly dismissed as a ‘lesbian’ – in quotes – fiction. It is a fine novel, cool and subtle; limited to that ‘small’ world of personal relationships, it highlights with immense charm the intimacy and deepening empathy between a patient and a psychiatrist, both women.

The patient, Caroline, a nurse although trained as a creative weaver, senses the peril of suicide. That is her problem. She apprehends the danger and wishes to avoid it, and she is a rational human being, as far as any one of us is so. Brought up in a rich liberal family who care more for those outside the family, Caroline leaps into an incompatible marriage and consequent divorce. At the time we meet her she is living with a female lover, a not wholly satisfactory relationship, partly because of the habit continuing long after it should have ended. Concurrently she takes on a male lover to define better her sexuality and discovers that homosexuality is for her the norm.

The psychiatrist, Hannah, recognizes parallels in her life to patterns in Caroline’s behaviour. The relationship between them develops into one of love, that may or may not ultimately be consummated in the future.

This is a very serious novel, moving, often funny and totally uninhibited. There is a superbly mature scene of an afternoon of sex between Caroline and a woman picked up in a sauna. A thoughtful novel about behaviour and motivation, it gives an excellent by-line on American society. Miss Alther’s canvas is not so historical as Mr Burgess’s yet it is just as convincing. It is a very difficult business being in love, yet, so Miss Alther suggests, only through love (and sex) can a human being experience joy in a positive and creative way.