The End of the World News: An Entertainment

Anthony Burgess's 1982 novel *The End of the World News: An Entertainment* is a single, unbroken narrative that braids three separate storylines. One follows Leon Trotsky during his 1917 visit to New York City, just before the Russian Revolution, and is written as the libretto for a Broadway musical. Another is a fictionalised biography of Sigmund Freud, told through dialogues with his family and contemporaries, beginning with his emigration from Vienna before World War II and moving non-chronologically through his life. The third is a science-fiction tale set in the future, where Earth is destroyed by a collision with an extrasolar planet called Lynx. The entire novel is framed as a chronicle being told to children in the distant future.

In the Freud section, the psychoanalyst lives in Vienna with his family when Nazi stormtroopers raid his home, seeking books to burn and money from wealthy Jews. His friend Dr. Ernest Jones persuades him to flee to England. Freud, suffering from jaw cancer, speaks with difficulty due to a prosthesis. His daughter Anna is briefly detained for questioning. Before leaving, Freud must obtain a certificate of non-objection and sign a statement that he was treated well by the Gestapo. On the train to France, he recalls key episodes: early debates about hypnosis, his discovery that neuroses need not have a physical cause, his use of cocaine (which led to a patient's overdose), and criticisms from colleagues like Breuer, Meynert, and Krafft-Ebing. He remembers seeing *Oedipus Rex* and resolving to write about it. He recalls a suicidal woman whose guilt he attributed to sexual desire, leading her husband to strike him. On an Alpine vacation, he treats a hysterical girl, diagnosing a suppressed wish to kill her mother; his wife Martha suggests the girl might have imagined the sexual incident with her father too, panicking Freud. After his father's death, Freud feels guilty. A patient sent by Professor Nothnagel refuses to free associate, and Nothnagel later dismisses Freud's work as trickery. A young man suicidal over his homosexuality is treated; his father is furious that his son now "rejoices in his depravity," but his mother, who liked *The Interpretation of Dreams*, promises to speak to the Minister of Education. Freud announces that parliament has approved psychoanalytic therapy.