In September 2000 Liana Burgess visited St Petersburg. For her, the trip was an opportunity to watch some current Russian events critically, before she re-read for all of us Honey for the Bears, Anthony Burgess's hilarious and inventive novel playing in the same town - the former Leningrad.

               The plot of Honey for the Bears:

Paul Hussey, an antique-dealer from Sussex, and his American wife Belinda go to Leningrad. Paul tries to raise some money by selling (illegally) drilon dresses to a people rich in cosmonauts but poor in consumer goods. But the logic of Soviet economics proves more dangerous than he ever imagined. Moreover, Leningrad turns out to be a city in which daylight dawns in the middle of the night...

Paul learns some unnerving truths about his own sexual nature, while his wife receives the keenest attention in the hands of the Russian bears from the State Medical Service.

Doubtless, this book let us think of the strange inheritance between a novelist and his heroes (or anti-heroes)...

 

There is nothing conclusive in Liana's essay. And this is her bravest gambit: she doesn't offer answers, only clues. As introduction to Honey for the Bears, her "running commentary" couldn't be better written but, as anyone lucky enough to have entered the world of Anthony Burgess knows, there is always something that resists investigation: the genesis of myth, perhaps.