The End of the World News: An Entertainment

The End of the World News is a 1982 novel by British author Anthony Burgess.

Presented without chapter breaks, the plot weaves together three storylines. One follows Leon Trotsky on a journey to New York City shortly before the Russian Revolution of 1917. This story is written as the libretto of an Off-Broadway musical. A second tale covers the life and career of Sigmund Freud and includes portrayals of Havelock Ellis and Krafft-Ebing. The third part is set in the future, shortly before the impact of a rogue, extrasolar planet with the Earth. Because of the latter story line, it is considered a work of fantastic fiction.

In 1896 as Sigmund Freud and family are vacationing in the French Alps, Freud receives a telegram informing him that his father has died. At the funeral, he is openly criticized by members of his own extended family when they learn of the often invasive and sexual nature of his work. Freud is gaining momentum as a psychoanalyst with many believing him to be a genius but other dismissing him as a lunatic. One of his colleagues Dr Meynert dismisses psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience and believes that the kindest thing to do for patients suffering from paranoia and manic depression would be to execute them. Professor Nothnegal sends Freud a patient who does not want to submit to his psychoanalytical methods. Freud suspect’s that Nothnegal has assigned him this patient in order to see him fail publicly but Freud perseveres and eventually the patient talks and is cured of his ailments. Freud's book “The Interpretation of Dreams” starts to sell very well. Freud is befriended by Havelock Ellis who tells him that although he has a fine grasp on psychoanalysis he believes there are many more secrets to discovered and proposes the two work together. Their work is successful and Freud soon discovers that the need for psychoanalysis has been passed by 90% of the French Parliament. Freud Starts a discussion group with Alfred Adler and a group of other physicians some of whom disagree with his particular methods. One day they are joined by another psychoanalyst and a fan of Freud, Carl Jung. Although initially harmonious, the group quickly starts to crumble when Adler claims that Jung is an anti-semite. At this time Freud is diagnosed with cancer of the mouth but perseveres with his work. Freud disagrees with the direction Adler takes their club and is ostracized from it for claiming Adler is a biologist and not qualified to indulge in psychoanalysis. Freud is soon warned by colleagues that the Nazi party do not approve of his particular strand of psychoanalysis, specifically because he is a Jew. Dr. Jones from Britain arrives in Vienna and tries to persuade Freud to leave with him but Freud refuses, comparing it to an officer leaving a sinking ship. That night The Gestapo turns up at Freud’s home and takes his daughter Anna for interrogation and to question her use of psychoanalytical work with children, believing her to be brainwashing you German youth. They let Anna go but instruct her to return first thing in the morning every day for further questioning. For Freud, this bullying of his daughter plus his deteriorating health prove to be the final straw and he accepts Jones's offer to leave for Britain. However, as one final act of embarrassment Freud is told by the Gestapo that he will have to sign an official Nazi document stating that he has been treated with nothing but respect by the party before he is allowed to leave which he reluctantly does. Word of Freud’s view that every psychoanalytical disorder can in some way be attributed to sex does not sit well with the medical school of Vienna but Freud goes ahead and insists on publishing his latest book which is used by the Nazis as evidence of the “sickness” of the Jewish mind which leads to one final public humiliation before he leaves Vienna.

Leon Trotsky is in New York and commissions a young woman named Olga to transcribe history musings into a manuscript. Trotsky upsets numerous New York natives by expressing doubt about the will of the American worker and laughing at the idea that all men are created equal. As he is transcribing a piece he mentioned that he believes that the Americans are silly for “wasting millions of dollars on a useless war”. Olga writes simply “war” but Trotsky emphasizes that he specified a “useless war”. As Trotsky pontificates to Olga, she eventually grows tired of what she suspects to be lies and believes that once a substantial number of his followers begin to question his world view he will cast them aside. Olga leaves and Trotsky, though angry confesses he finds himself attracted to her due to her assertiveness. During a public talk by Trotsky, a New York politician named Ernst Schnitzler announces that an American submarine has been sunk and tries to start a riot but Trotsky denies that such a submarine existed. Trotsky is bullied by the American working class who resent him telling them how to run their country. One night he narrowly avoids being beaten by a gang of New York street thugs and he decides to leave after he hears that a revolution has taken place in his home country.

A rogue, extrasolar planet is on collision course with the Earth. A small number of people are aware that the collision will be catastrophic and destroy the Earth. The general public is not told the whole truth. In America, a secretive project is initiated to evacuate a carefully selected group of fifty scientists (25 male and 25 female) onboard a giant spaceship that will save humanity. The project is led by Professor Hubert Frame and his daughter Dr. Vanessa (“Van”) Brodie, both renowned ouranologists, and subsequently appointed Head of Enterprise, Paul Bartlett. The spaceship is located in a remote, secretive site in central Kansas where the designated passengers will muster.

Vanessa is married to Valentine (“Val”) Brodie, a lecturer in science fiction at the University of Westchester, and a moderately successful writer on the subject. His students question him about the TV news story about "Lynx", the so-named space object heading towards Earth. Val dismisses the story and reassures his students that the object will spin harmlessly around the sun and then disappear. Van and Val's marriage is in difficulty and following a row, Val goes downtown to drink where he befriends a department store Santa (and ex-actor) named Courtland Willet. Knowing that married couples will not be allowed on board the spaceship, Vanessa arranges to divorce her husband so that he will get a place on the spaceship based on his own merits. Before departing to the spaceship site, Val goes to have a final drink with Willett. They two get arrested and Val misses the flight with Vanessa who is later told by her father (due to a case of mistaken identity) that Val has been killed in a brawl in New York. Val and Willett are soon released from custody, and find refuge from the violent storms and rising sea levels in various New York hotels where they remain for some months while the storms subside and then helping with the city cleanup. Although Val was never told the exact location of the spaceship, he later realises he had predicted its likely location in one of his old sci-fi books. Val and Willett embark on a frantic journey to Kansas to reach, and hopefully board, the spaceship.

Meanwhile, one of the fifty scientists on board the spaceship is Nat Goya who tells Bartlett that his computers have made a mistake as he is a married man with a child on the way. He tells Bartlett that if his wife is not allowed on board then he wants to leave but Bartlett refuses as Goya is the world’s best micro-agronomist. Goya escapes from the spaceship site, but is quickly recaptured and then executed. Nat’s devoutly religious, now widowed wife, Edwina, is convinced her unborn child is the Lord’s child, the Second Coming. She convinces Calvin Gropius, an evangelical preacher, that they are destined for righteous salvation onboard the spaceship and embark on a frantic journey to Kansas too.

On board Tallis, Frame confesses that he did not allow Val on the ship and kills himself out of guilt. This causes an uprising and Bartlett is killed by the other passengers. Bartlett’s understudy Calvin Gropius takes control of the ship and flies it to Kansas after learning it is one of the few American states still left intact. Upon landing Valentine is reunited with Vanessa. After packing the ship with as many survivors as possible Willet decides that he will not board the ship with his friend and will instead stay behind, believing that the Earth will not be completely devastated by the comet and keen to help with the rebuilding and recovery. Before the ship takes off Willet gives Valentine audio discs of two radio plays he once played small acting roles in: “Freud” and “Trotsky’s in New York”. After a ceremonial playing of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, the ship takes off to seek a new world.

The book ends in a classroom on the spaceship, at an unknown date and place in the future, where a teacher named Valentine O'Grady is asking his young students (descendants of the original fifty scientists) their thoughts on the story he has just told them. The children think the people and events described are just a myth. They believe that they have always been on the spaceship and do not recognise being on a journey as told by O’Grady. The children refer to another myth they know about, which involves a bad man called "Fred Fraud" and a good one called "Trot Sky". The school bell rings and the students hastily leave the classroom, having already forgotten what O'Grady was trying to tell them.

Reviewing the book for The New York Times, Anatole Broyard concluded that "Mr. Burgess might have written a very good science-fiction novel if he had been more interested in entertaining the reader rather than himself."^[1]