The 1989 novel Any Old Iron by Anthony Burgess is a grand tour of the major events of the first half of the twentieth century, from the sinking of the Titanic and the outbreak of the First World War to the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948.Footnote 1 It is perhaps the author’s most ambitious attempt in novel form to engage with the fluidity and heterogeneity of British and European history, language, literature and identity. He engages with these issues in a daring fictional examination of the Excalibur story, with the blurb on the back cover of the Arrow reprint proclaiming Excalibur as the ‘flashing blade that hangs over the fates of men and women caught up in the chaos of history’ (Burgess, 1989). Burgess’ Excalibur signifies in many ways, but one of its main functions is to comment on the fragmented and unreliable nature of both history and myth. Burgess, also using the history–myth nexus, shows that they mingle and contribute to or facilitate new readings of the past. The novel explores, then, the tension between historical fact and the idea of history, and the various ways in which history and myth are (re)appropriated to political and other ends.

Any Old Iron has at its center the fortune of the Jones family from Wales. In the early twentieth century David Jones runs away to sea, survives the sinking of the Titanic, becomes a cook in New York, marries Ludmilla, the daughter of his Russian employer, and then returns to Wales, from whence he joins the ranks leaving to fight in the trenches of the Western Front. When injured Jones is redeployed to Ireland when the 1916 Easter Rising occurs and, because he is eventually reported as Missing in Action, his wife Ludmilla returns to Russia and manages to get caught up in the Revolution of 1917. The children of David and Ludmilla – Beatrice (Trixie), Reg and Dan – along with their friends, the Jewish narrator and his sister Ziphora (the percussionist who marries Reg), broaden the family experience to encompass the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War – as soldier, prisoner or diplomat – terrorism and nationalism in the new state of Israel and also in Wales.

Burgess’ novel has received very little scholarly attention, and none it seems that references the medievalism in which it is so obviously interested. Burgess’ medievalism is not straightforward: he does not recreate in fiction a medieval world through which contemporary concerns are refracted, but he does reimagine in fiction ways in which the Middle Ages might have influenced the present and, by extension, the relationship between present realities and versions of the past. I propose here that, on a spectrum, Burgess’ work is closer to neomedievalism than to medievalism, the latter defined by Workman as ‘the continuing process of creating the Middle Ages’ (Workman, 2009, 20). There is no stable definition of neomedievalism, but several accounts of it privilege the artistic re-appropriation of the historical events or cultural moments of the period: for instance, Marshall writes that neomedievalism is a ‘self-conscious, ahistorical, non-nostalgic imagining or reuse of the historical Middle Ages that selectively appropriates iconic images … to construct a presentist space that disrupts traditional depictions of the medieval’ (Marshall, 2011, 22), while Robinson and Clements emphasize that neomedievalism is ‘anti-historical … a phenomenon of distortion that steps outside of historical consciousness but also changes the very nature of that consciousness’ (Robinson and Clements, 2010, 65). Both of these definitions might apply to Burgess’ project since it involves a deliberate distortion of the received notion of the medieval in order to challenge constructions of the past. His work registers a discomfort around historical fact, but we should not doubt the scholarly meticulousness that he brings to his novel, reminding us that ‘many creative (artistic) productions […] combine creative work with accepted knowledge, in that the artist(s) involved strive to arrive at a construction that may be fictitious but does not contradict known relevant historical circumstances’ (Petersen, 2011, 38). Burgess invents a new Middle Ages, it seems, in order to question the nature of knowledge itself.

While Any Old Iron, in its exploration of the tensions inherent to humanity in modernity, uses real events ‘as the backdrop to the fictional action’ (Spence, 2008, 211), the framework for Burgess’ final major work is decidedly mythological and medieval. This framework operates in two ways. Burgess reimagines the Excalibur/Arthur myth in order to better understand modernity and the particular struggles of the twentieth century that relate to origin, nation, race and territory. But he simultaneously undercuts and problematizes these explorations through an insistence on the unreliability of the grand narrative of history precisely because it is often indistinguishable from myth, with survivals – of artefacts as well as of texts – that are too often fragmentary. These issues converge on the image of the sword Excalibur even in the opening pages of the novel. The apparent solidity and durability of the sword – both as a figure and as an object – is in tension with the malleability both of metal and myth:

All those salts resident in air and soil and water, eating steadily at what was itself called the eater. For the name Excalibur comes from the Welsh Caledvwlch, which is tied up with the Irish Caladbolg, and Caladbolg means hard belly or capable of eating anything. (1)

Burgess’ narrator reminds us that steel is an alloy of iron (so, even as a physical object, Excalibur is compound) and that it deteriorates over time with overexposure to air and contact with salt and with sodium chloride. Metallurgists have to then reject the claim, Burgess writes, that the sword survived into the twentieth century. But the very fact of Excalibur – its existence as a single object/symbol in narrative history, or perhaps the way in which we have received it and chosen to interpret its meaning – is also called into question: its origins are unstable and it relates to multiple national and linguistic contexts. The ultimate aim of Burgess in the novel is to use the historicity of Excalibur to ask audiences to consider how national identities are built out of fragments and myths, but his engagement with a very potent symbol of the British Middle Ages comments with characteristic acuity on the frailty of aspects of human endeavor across the ages.

Published just four years before the author’s death, Any Old Iron was well received critically and is considered by many to be the most important work of Burgess’ late career. Nonetheless, the work remains overlooked by critics and scholars, perhaps a consequence of the scope and structure of the novel. However, for many early readers, at least, this chaos is central to interpretations of the novel. In a prominent review appearing in the London Review of Books, Campbell admires the project of the novel: he praises the attempt to understand the present (whatever present that might be) by interrogating the past (be that history or myth), acknowledging the

global range that includes by reference and by implication huge volumes of contemporary history. Stories which bring in two world wars or the coming eco-crisis or the sunset of Empire must break unities of space or time. The impulse to attempt them is easy to understand […] telling stories about the global village leads to problems of figure and ground: how to combine the domestic scale with the broad view. (Campbell, 1989, 16)

Any Old Iron is an extraordinary novel, then, in terms of its scope and references, and readers will have gleaned some sense of its chaotic nature from the short description of the life of David Jones (above).

Although it is indeed unremittingly anarchic, much like the century of revolutions, wars and humanitarian crises to which it responds, Any Old Iron is framed by musings on history, continuity and connections, with the most emphatic statements placed by Burgess in the mouths of those characters who briefly flit in and out of the novel. In an early chapter, two Welshmen drink in a bar in New York on St. David’s Day, 1913. One of these men, Dai Williams, is a long-time exile and Welsh nationalist who offers a drunken account of the demise of the Brythonic Celts at the hands of Henry II. The second man is one of the main characters: his drinking companion David Jones, arrived in New York just the previous year, having made part of his journey aboard the Titanic. At length Jones interjects, complaining to Williams that he is ‘just sick of hearing of all the wrongs and evils done in the old days. It’s all gone under the water and what we have to do is like [sic.] make a fresh start’ (13). Williams responds by offering his potted philosophy on the impossibility of leaving behind past events: ‘[…] you won’t be rid of the wrongs of history all that quick […] [w]hen you step into the future you will always have the mud and filth of the past stuck to your boots and no iron scraper will ever be able to clean it all off’ (13–14). Again, close to the end of the novel, another character makes a brief appearance to reflect upon history and its impact on the present. At a gathering in 1948 of the London Welsh association at Glendower Hall, near to Edgware Road, at which the recovered sword of Arthur, Excalibur (or more properly Caledvwlch), is about to be displayed, Professor Griffiths of the University College of Cardiff delivers a short speech. Burgess’ narrator notes that he spoke in an ‘accent with no Welsh lilt,’ prefacing his comments by reinforcing that what he has to say has ‘no political import,’ being unconcerned with ‘the claim of certain sectors of the Welsh people that the principality of Wales or Cymru should revert to a position of ancient independence under its own rulers’ (346). He continues: ‘The point I would make is that the past is a living current which continually nourishes the present, and that any tangible fragment of the past must be cherished as a symbol of that nourishment’ (346).

Although it is a constant presence throughout the novel, Excalibur features particularly in both of the meditations on history that function as frames to the novel. Although the sentiments differ in their direct response to the role of history in the present, they both refer to the key concepts that are explored by Burgess in the novel. Just as the iron scraper leaves some mud – fragments, even – that cling to those shoes that will march into the future, so is the ‘Excalibur’ that is presented to the London Welsh association itself a fragment, by no means a recognizable object, nor verifiable as a genuine artefact. Griffiths claims that the sword has ‘emerged out of the mists, no longer a myth but a tangible substance, a solidity which affirms the reality of the past as a force which works on the present and, indeed, the future’ (346), yet he acknowledges that the sword cannot be verified as real, and when it is finally revealed to the audience the response is one of extreme disappointment; there is even some condescending laughter. The famous sword is no more than a ‘long chunk of bitten metal naked in the bright lamp’ (351). And this fragment of a myth, a history, itself anticipates fragmentation. As the sword is uncovered, the speaker cries: ‘The sword of Arthur asks us with its dumb steel to pledge ourselves to the rebuilding of a country once great and free, now declining and in bondage’ (351). A bomb then explodes at the back of the hall, and chaos ensues, just as Europe sits on the brink of fragmentation at the opening of the book. Even as a ‘tangible fragment,’ the sword fails in its hoped-for symbolic function as a wholesome force for unity.

At the beginning of the novel, then, Excalibur is a potent idea, a powerful symbol of national unity and continuity. If it once existed it is most likely decayed, but the myth resonates especially for those who wish to be associated with Celtic Wales. But by the novel’s close the sword has become ‘real,’ uncovered in Glendower Hall in London having been stolen from the Soviets: it is the Any Old Iron of the title, conferred with significance by experts and academics. One of the main characters, Welshman Dan Jones, is taken prisoner during the Second World War by the Germans in Italy. While in captivity Dan sees the sword, one of the relics stolen from the Benedictine monks at Monte Cassino. This Nazi loot soon becomes Russian loot with the advance of the Red Army, and then – because it is stolen by Reg Jones, Dan’s brother, from the Ermitage in Leningrad – it becomes Welsh loot. According to Peter Campbell, the appearance of the relic, like the golden goose in the fairy tale, makes those who grab it absurd. The conclusion seems to be that no crusade is worthy of Arthur’s sword, that injustice can never be avenged and that individuals cannot avoid individual responsibility.

Yet Excalibur and the Arthurian myth function here in ways that are more complex, permitting Burgess to problematize identity and nationalism (especially linguistic and cultural nationalism) and, specifically, to call attention to the irony that nation and place are disrupted and threatened by those struggles that seek to preserve and conserve them. In her study of the figures of Arthur and Robin Hood, Barczewski observes that fictional and historical treatments of the figure and myth of Arthur, from the first half of the twentieth century in particular, witnessed renewed efforts to ‘rediscover Arthur’s true historical identity.’ This was motivated by

new archaeological discoveries which have dramatically increased … knowledge about the murky period between the departure of the Romans and the arrival of the Saxons. It has become more and more difficult to assert Arthur’s ‘Englishness’ in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary. In addition […] the emergence of a revitalized Welsh nationalist movement has contributed to the emergence of a new, ‘more Celtic’ Arthur as well. (Barczewski, 2000, 236–237)

What Barczewski’s work seems to identify is that, by turns throughout the twentieth century, the Arthur of history and fiction came to represent ideologically a nation united against the threat of Nazi dominance and a kind of racial and linguistic superiority tied into Victorian ideas around empire and purity. But those ideas are consistently called into question by and are in tension with historical ‘truth’ and interest in Arthur as a Celtic hero. Burgess engages with these matters in order to reject and ridicule facile appropriations, making his focus instead the human story – a fact noticed by the novelist Susan Fromburg Schaeffer in her review of the book for the New York Times. She says that Burgess

looks at human destiny and finds it fashioned (and usually twisted) by the two warring and fundamentally irreconcilable imperatives of human nature. One is the desire for something absolute, unchangeable … This imperative is opposed by the human need to survive simply, as the animal among other animals that man is – to eat magnificently, to smell the many fragrances of the earth, to beat swords into, as Mr Burgess would have it, knives and forks. (Schaeffer, 1989)

Fromburg identifies what Excalibur signifies at different stages in the novel. The sword seems at first to symbolize grand ideals – unity, nationhood and identity – but its relation to such matters is consistently ridiculed by Burgess and by his characters and, by the novel’s end, the sword has come to represent a more complex set of ideas. We have witnessed humanity crawl through the troubled early decades of the twentieth century, and somehow the sword now seems to represent human endurance and the persistence of the human spirit in the (flawed) search for unity, purity and meaning.

But there is a tension here. Excalibur in part becomes a figure for the triumph of the flawed human spirit, but at the beginning of the novel it is both destructive and subject to decay. Burgess begins his novel with a discourse on metallurgy, history and mythology, focusing on the essentialism of the sword; however, the absolutism and purity of the sword as an ancient object and a symbol for unity is immediately and consistently undercut. The fact of metal means that Excalibur is, as Bennett articulates, both ‘rigid and inert’ but also ‘vibrant matter’ (Bennett, 2010, xvii). For Burgess, Excalibur is rigid and penetrable, both in terms of its natural properties but also with respect to its ideological qualities. Equally, Burgess sees nationhood, language and identity both in the early Middle Ages, when the sword is meant to have been forged, and in modernity, as capable of being influenced and augmented, creating a layered, complex reality over time. Like the sword, an alloy to begin with, and an item that can have significance thrust upon it, ideas of national identity and even the complexion of languages change over time, corrupted by the comingling of peoples, ideas and narratives. In the hands of Burgess the sword is not a symbol of unity, evidencing instead a more complex relationship with imperialism and nation that is characteristic of the fiction of the early twentieth century.Footnote 2 Rather, the world Burgess writes is increasingly border-less, and Excalibur, as a porous object, speaks to the historical and continuous marriages of nations and peoples, exemplified in the biological and chemical processes that are intrinsic to the making and decaying of the sword. Burgess rejects the appropriation of such an object in order to impose a sense of identity, highlighting the uncertainty around mythological symbolism by supplying an equally fantastic history for the sword:

Hilt and guard were both long gone and point and edges blunted, but the blade shone with a memory of defiance, and on the blade had been stippled a capital A or alpha. It was shallow close pitting, presumably done with a nail and hammer. This was clearly an initial of ownership. The A, I understand, was serifed with stylized beechleaves […] The A did not primarily denote the ownership of King Arthur, who may or may not have existed, but that of a more formidable personage who certainly existed: I mean Attila the Hun. The legend of Attila’s lieutenant general Scotta finding the sword on the Hungarian plain is, I think, well known. Aware of bleeding in his ankle, Scotta looked down to find a swordpoint sticking out of the earth. He disinterred the whole weapon and had no doubt that this was the legendary Sword of Mars, which conferred victory on all who owned it. He gave it to Attila, who ordered the stippling of his initial (A or alpha: he knew both Latin and Greek) […] he bequeathed the weapon to Aetius, the Roman general who had been both his friend and his enemy. After the assassination of Aetius the sword passed to Ambrosius Aurelanius, king of Britain. (2)

Excalibur is hybrid and heterogeneous rather than essential, and it has its origins, just like the people who want to believe in it, in a Europe with a chequered history of conquest and conflict, intermarriage, cultural exchange. When David Jones joins the army due to ‘patriotic headlines’ (20) he encounters, in the Royal Gwent Regiment, the Sons of Arthur. This group is concerned to recover the throne of Wales for the Brythonic Celts, and they speak about the ghost of Arthur the King, which they say has been seen galloping over the hills on his charger, the sword brandished high. The glorious days, according to Private Morgan, will soon come, and the Welsh are ready for them, trained in the use of weapons by the English who, he says, are too soft to see the portents (31). This and the various other statements on racial purity are challenged and ridiculed by Burgess in several tacit ways: in the presence of David Jones, whose Russian wife Ludmilla is more fluent in Welsh than he; in the dissenting voice of Private Evans, who speaks about the real struggle of the proletariat and anticipates the Russian Revolution; in the context of the First World War, which itself has an ever-shifting battleground and even an imaginary set of lines, and which will spew out new nations and identities; in the Irish rebellion, occurring mid-war in 1916; the future Spanish Civil War, which, though a national struggle, is in every respect European concern; and in the fact that, for now, the Sons of Arthur are dealing with a history-myth paradigm, and only a fraction or a fragment of the full narrative. If Burgess’ novel is an attempt to update the Arthurian myth, it is also self-consciously a pseudo-academic discourse that comments directly on the rich nature and the complex transmission of history and myth, as well as the imperatives of humans to shape and reshape a living history. For the Sons of Arthur (a fictional example of those academic movements keen to reveal the true racial origins of Arthur) history is simple: the ‘A’ stippled on the sword stands for Arthur, and he is Welsh. But for Burgess the ‘A’ is a fragment of a complex and unstable story. Excalibur as an object and as a myth, then, also speaks to the nature of the transmission of information not just in the early medieval period but also in the modern, modernized, world.

By his emphasis on the fragment that is the sword and the fragmentary nature of the legends surrounding it, Burgess calls attention to the unreliability of much of the history on which modern notions of self, nation, identity and difference are established. When in 1943 a German Luftwaffe squadron bombs a Welsh coalfield, the daughter-in-law of David Jones reads in the Manchester Guardian about what it uncovers, remarking, ‘So […] it seems he was no myth then’ (107). The ‘he’ to whom she refers is King Arthur, but what is thrown up by the bombs is a set of fragments: ‘bits of carved stone and Latin inscriptions. GLAD ART REG is one of them. It’s on what they call here a kind of stone plinth with a slit in it. GLAD means GLADIUM means a sword. ART REG is Arthur the king. The man here says that Professor Rhys Jones had better not jump to hasty conclusions’ (107). What was once a coal mine is now a site for excavation of another kind, and a locus for attempts to reconstruct a wished-for past from rubble and fragments. Burgess makes much of this site in Gilwern in the second half of his novel; even as the war still wages, a busy team of archeologists is at work excavating the coalfield, and tension increases for the reader between modern nation-building – the ideological search for a tangible site that links Arthur definitively to Wales – and the destructive potential of nation-building activities, both medieval and modern. We as readers are asked to focus on the rubble, and the ways in which even the academic search for truth and knowledge in rubble can be partisan as well as the potential of rubble to be generative: to produce or stimulate the new out of the old. But this potential is stilted by the response of the Sons of Arthur Welsh independence movement as they seize upon the part-statement offered by the stone fragment as proof positive of their legitimate claim to demand independence from the ‘Sasanach’; the legitimacy they derive from the discovery of the site (still under excavation, with some academics claiming that the inscription ART REG can mean REGULUS ARTIFEX, a surviving slave name [366]) leads, in a paradox, to their reign of terror not in England but in Wales (a third minor character, Dr. Lewis, condemns their wielding of a moth-eaten weapon in an age where the real contest is between the superpowers). On a sleepy day in 1948 they rob a bank in Abergavenny (near the archeological site), where old people and war veterans still dressed in their demob suits, and still experiencing rationing, queue to withdraw what money is available. The reaction of the war-weary customers to their claim that they represent the Welsh Liberation Movement is at first indifference, but once a shot is fired a man in the queue says: ‘We’ve had a bloody nough, six years of it, you buggers’ (250). But the robber insists, directing his comments at Reg and Dan Jones: ‘You’re not in the army now, you’re in at the beginning of Welsh independence’ (250–251). Just a few weeks later the narrator reads about the crowning of the Prince of Wales on the Gilwern bomb–archaeology nexus; this was taken as a harmless joke by both The Times and the Daily Mail:

There was in the latter a photograph of the prince, Arthur Cadwallader, grinning rather stupidly under a stage coronet. Not many had turned up for the event, which had taken place under rain […] Words had been spoken in both Welsh and English about an independent Cymru, and every good Cymro and Cymraes, making up the totality of the nation known as the Cymry, was to help initiate the resurgence of an ancient patriotism by disobeying the laws of the English […] Taxes, the prince said, must not be paid. Cymric reservoirs must not be permitted to feed water to Gloucestershire […] I finished my breakfast […] My mind moved from the independence of another territory. My father wrote from Tel Aviv. (277)

As coachloads of American visitors arrive to see the site related to the once and future king at Gilwern, it would seem that the Celtic past is now the commercial present.Footnote 3 Burgess ultimately finds that literature makes more sense of the present than do history and myth. The novel closes with the casting of ‘Excalibur’ by the Jones brothers into a lake near a Benedictine monastery, where the sword now waits to be rediscovered at a different time, to create a new thread of narrative (or perhaps to decay further); its discarding, however, also represents the rejection of a century of violence. Dan Jones says to his brother Reg: ‘You can’t be fighting all the time […] you’ve touched the hand of a king who never existed […] What more do you want?’; Dan does not respond, but the narrator comments that he wanted ‘not to have been reserved for the life of this century,’ or, ‘as we all do, reality transcending time’ (385–386). Burgess ultimately condemns not Excalibur but what it has been made to do by the characters in his novel: it has been used to render history simple, reductive; to say that the past is easier, less complex than the present. It is in fact the case that the past – even as our knowledge of it is fragmentary – cannot be simplified, generalized nor escaped.