Tristram Foxe and his wife, Beatrice-Joanna, live in their skyscraper world where official family limitation glorifies homosexuality. Eventually, their world is transformed into a chaos of cannibalistic dining-clubs, fantastic fertility rituals, and wars without anger. It is a novel both extravagantly funny and grimly serious. The Wanting Seed by Anthony Burgess – eBook Details A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy. The book closes with a translation of the final stanza of the French poet Paul Valéry's poem ' Le Cimetière marin'. The quotation clarifies the book's themes:

The people don’t just work for themselves; they work together. Overpopulation has always been a problem in the futuristic London that Burgess portrays. God has become a myth even though some still practice their religion. God has turned into some sort of Santa Clause because everyone is working to better the problems that they and the government are having. The government suggests that homosexuality could help the population troubles, but they don’t enforce it or make it law. The story is concerned with the vicissitudes of Tristram Foxe and his wife Beatrice-Joanna in their skyscraper world of spacelessness where official family limitation glorifies homosexuality (" It's Sapiens to be Homo") and which is eventually transformed into a chaos of cannibalistic dining-clubs, fantastic fertility rituals, and wars without anger. It is a novel both extravagantly funny and grimly serious. As crop failures spread worldwide, reports of violent assaults, murders, and cannibalism begin to surface from around the world. Uh oh. As Tristram tries to get out of prison, Beatrice-Joanna gives birth to twins. Before she can find a good place to raise them, she's captured by the Population Police.

I guess the basic premise is that the world is overpopulated, so you're limited to how many children you can have. But polite, genteel people don't have any. Given the right environment and a willingness to abandon traditional notions of freedom, Skinner claims, utopia might become a reality for everyone. What I didn't expect was the idea of this 'dystopia' being a rather attractive society to live in - one where homosexuality is not only legal but promoted and religion is absent. The entire narrative is laced with repugnant prejudices, which was to be expected from a novel written in the 1960s - however it was laughable to me that something which seemed to be viewed as a terrifying future in this book is rightfully accepted today. I eventually learned to just grit my teeth and bear it, although it originally made it hard to sympathise with any of the characters. Beware those who are easily offended, there is some especially incendiary stuff in here. Burgess once said, "I have spent the last 25 years thinking that The Wanting Seed could, in my leisurely old age, be expanded to a length worthy of the subject." The Wanting Seed is a great read. Part societal study and certainly a criticism of British society. Anthony Burgess ask what happens to British society if the population overwhelms food supplies. This has been called a comedy, but I am not sure I agree. It is certainly satire, but not so sure it is funny. He certainly lampoons the upper crust and social climbers along with British stoicism, yet it is wrapped in tragedy.

Shipped off with other British Army soldiers to the front, Tristram is convinced that the whole war is a sham. When trench fighting erupts between Tristram's men and "the enemy," his worst fears are confirmed. The novel begins by introducing the two protagonists: Tristram Foxe, a history teacher, and his wife, Beatrice-Joanna, a homemaker. They have recently suffered through their young son's death. One of the major conflicts of the novel is between Tristram and his brother, Derek. Very much alike at first, Derek chose a different path from Tristram and pretends to be homosexual while in public, to help his career as a government official. Derek has an affair with Beatrice-Joanna, and when she forgets to take her State-provided contraceptives she becomes illegally pregnant. She has sex with her husband, Tristram, and his brother, Derek, within a 24-hour time span, thus the paternity of her twin boys is uncertain.Interphase is the darkening of Pelphase into Gusphase – an "Intermediate" phase. As Tristram explains things, the government grows increasingly disappointed in its population's inability to be truly good, and thus police forces are strengthened and the state becomes Totalitarian. In many respects, Interphase is a finite version of George Orwell's 1984. The Wanting Seed is not the only dystopia dealing with reproductive freedom and overpopulation in the 1960s. In Burgess’s world, the failure of birth control leads governments to control the populace by eliminating citizens through orchestrated wars whose sole purpose is to kill people. Logan’s Run, the 1967 novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, depicts the future world of 2116, where citizens are executed with a pleasure-inducing toxic gas as soon as they have reached the age of 21. Overpopulation is also the subject of Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison, a 1966 novel, later adapted as the film Soylent Green (1973), starring Charlton Heston. As with The Wanting Seed, the film’s solution to famine caused by overpopulation is to convert people into food, the ‘soylent green’ of the title. Burgess claims in his autobiography that ‘Harry Harrison, on his own confession during the downing of a bottle of Scotch in my New York flat, stole the ending for the film of his novel No Room! No Room! [sic] called Soylent Green.’ Burgess may have misremembered this. As the writer Ramsey Campbell has noted, the novel has a different ending, and Harry Harrison was excluded from the production of Soylent Green by the film-makers. It is clear that many themes and ideas are shared between The Wanting Seed and the film version of Soylent Green, although Harrison himself seems not to have been responsible for the plagiarism. The book was regarded as a light, if dark, comedy, and nobody would take seriously that cannibalism might be the solution to the world’s crowding and hunger. I was told that all human flesh was toxic. Then came the Andes disaster and the survival of the fittest through the eating of their fellows. The survivors proved, on examination, to be well nourished but terribly constipated. I think it possible that one day we will find cans of meat in our markets called Mench or Munch, human flesh seasoned with sodium nitrate. Captain Loosley – a bumbling Population Police officer who attempts to derail Derek Foxe's civil service career.