Tremor of Intent: An Eschatological Spy Novel
Encyclopedia
Tremor of Intent: An Eschatological Spy Novel (1966), by Anthony Burgess
Anthony Burgess
John Burgess Wilson  – who published under the pen name Anthony Burgess – was an English author, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic. The dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange is Burgess's most famous novel, though he dismissed it as one of his lesser works...

, is an English espionage novel. Burgess conceived it as a reaction to both the heavy-handed, humorless spy fiction of John le Carré
John le Carré
David John Moore Cornwell , who writes under the name John le Carré, is an author of espionage novels. During the 1950s and the 1960s, Cornwell worked for MI5 and MI6, and began writing novels under the pseudonym "John le Carré"...

 and to Ian Fleming
Ian Fleming
Ian Lancaster Fleming was a British author, journalist and Naval Intelligence Officer.Fleming is best known for creating the fictional British spy James Bond and for a series of twelve novels and nine short stories about the character, one of the biggest-selling series of fictional books of...

's James Bond
James Bond
James Bond, code name 007, is a fictional character created in 1953 by writer Ian Fleming, who featured him in twelve novels and two short story collections. There have been a six other authors who wrote authorised Bond novels or novelizations after Fleming's death in 1964: Kingsley Amis,...

, a character Burgess thought an imperialist relic. Its subtitle, "An Eschatological Spy Novel", refers to Burgess' idea of the Cold War as a hostile symbiosis, an "ultimate conflict" wherein Good and Evil are inadequate terms.

In Burgess' view, Russia and the West formed a yin and yang
Yin and yang
In Asian philosophy, the concept of yin yang , which is often referred to in the West as "yin and yang", is used to describe how polar opposites or seemingly contrary forces are interconnected and interdependent in the natural world, and how they give rise to each other in turn. Opposites thus only...

-type duoverse; in You've Had Your Time, Being the Second Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess, the writer confesses that the title occurred to him one hungover morning when his hand began shaking; "That", his wife said, "is tremor of intent". Upon publication, the novel confused readers and critics, because it straddled the dichotomies of serious fiction and comic fiction, of popular genre storytelling and of metaphysical philosophy.

Plot summary

The amoral Agent Hillier of MI6 journeys to the city of Yarylyuk aboard the passenger ship Polyolbion, on a mission to infiltrate a convention of Soviet scientists and return to Britain his childhood friend Roper, who has defected to Russia. En route, he meets the sexually precocious sixteen-year-old Clara, the voluptuous femme fatale
Femme fatale
A femme fatale is a mysterious and seductive woman whose charms ensnare her lovers in bonds of irresistible desire, often leading them into compromising, dangerous, and deadly situations. She is an archetype of literature and art...

Miss Devi, and the shadowy tycoon Theodorescu.
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