Beds in the East

Beds in the East is the third novel in Anthony Burgess's Malayan Trilogy The Long Day Wanes. It was published in 1959.

The title is taken from a line spoken by Mark Antony in Antony and Cleopatra, act 2, scene 6: "The beds i' the east are soft; and thanks to you,/That call'd me timelier than my purpose hither;/For I have gain'd by 't."

Characters
•Victor Crabbe, headmaster and education officer
•Robert Loo, a brilliant boy composer whose musical career Crabbe seeks to further
•Rosemary Michael, an "eminently nubile" Eurasian with "quite considerable capacity for all kinds of sensuous pleasure"
•Tommy Jones, beer salesman. "That's my line. I sell beer all over the East. Thirty years on the job. Three thousand a month and a car allowance and welcome wherever I go."
•Lim Cheng Po, an Anglophile lawyer
•Liversedge, an Australian judge who harbours a secret resentment against the English
•Moneypenny, an anthropologist studying the hill tribes and living in the Malayan jungle. He has lost touch with civilisation to the extent that he believes it is lethal to laugh at butterflies and "now regarded even a lavatory as supererogatory".