In pursuit of Anthony Burgess: Bell bottoms in the rainforest

In August 1954 an eccentric, chippy English teacher named John Burgess Wilson made a rather miserable boat journey to Malaya. His first two novels had just been rejected by Heinemann. He and his wife, Lynne, had become addicted to gin on the long voyage; by the time they arrived at Singapore, Lynne was so paralytic that their journey north into the peninsula had to be postponed until she had dried out. Wilson hadn't even intended to apply for the teaching position in the Colonial Service. He thought, he said later, that he had written about a job in theChannel Islands, but had mixed the locations up when posting his letter drunk.

During the five years he spent in Malaya and Brunei as a Colonial Officer, Wilson was frequently in trouble with his superiors and the police, his marriage became hellish and he ended up being invalided home with a suspected cerebral tumour after he lay down on a classroom floor and refused to get up.

But it was the making of him. For, as his biographer Roger Lewis puts it: "John Wilson went to Malaya and came back as Anthony Burgess." The man who was to go on to write such celebrated novels as Earthly Powers and A Clockwork Orange - and to assume the persona of the pseudonym he wrote under - finally found his voice in a country where the white man's role was to prepare three races, the Malays, Chinese and Indians, for independence; and, while he was at it, to try to avoid being shot or garrotted by the Communist insurgents who lurked nearby in the omnipresent rainforests.

By the time he left the East, Burgess was the published author of the three novels known as the Malayan Trilogy and had begun, in his forties, one of the most prolific and successful literary careers of the late 20th century. He was happy to acknowledge his debt to the country. "The Malay language," he wrote, "changed not just my attitude to communication in general but the whole shape of my mind."

Fifty years after the declaration of independence - the focal point of all three novels - I stand outside Burgess's classroom at the Malay College in Kuala Kangsar, a boarding school set up in 1905 for the sons of the Malay upper classes and known as the "Eton of the East". Here it was that the trouble all began for Victor Crabbe, the trilogy's hero; here too it began for Burgess. It was to this classroom that Crabbe, and Burgess, walked from quarters in the King's Pavilion (the former British Residence) overlooking the Perak river, arriving drenched in sweat. It was around this town, thinly disguised as Kuala Hantu (estuary of ghosts), that Burgess/Crabbe earned odd looks from his fellow colonials for drinking in local dives rather than amongst white men.

For Time for a Tiger, the first of the trilogy, and set around the Malay College (renamed Mansor School), is no mere novel. It is so closely related to actual events that many identified themselves - often with displeasure - when it was published. (The second book provoked similar reactions, and even a libel case.) It was this authenticity that led Burgess to claim that he had captured Malaya and Borneo more accurately than either Somerset Maugham or Conrad. But it also led to ambivalence among those who knew him then. Should they be proud to have been immortalised by such a famous writer, or was he just using them?

The Malay College old boys of the class of '55 who had Burgess as their form master as well as English teacher are agreed on one thing: they'd never come across anyone like him before. "He was the first Bohemian we had met," recalls Ariff Babu, now a businessman in nearby Ipoh. He wore bell-bottomed trousers, and rarely a tie. He sweated profusely - "wiping out the drips from his forehead and neck to no end, while his armpits were never dry," remembers another pupil, Suleiman Manan - and constantly ran his hands through a stubbornly errant forelock. Mr Wilson was certainly no smooth Oxonian. "He was not elegant in speech," says Suleiman, "munching his words to a mumble as though he had had too much whisky the night before."

But Burgess impressed by not speaking down to his charges - he addressed them as "gentlemen", a term Suleiman says had never been used to them before - and also by his command of Malay, written in Jawi, the Arabic script common at that time. "I can never forget his first day in class," says Ariff. "He strode to the blackboard and in a firm hand wrote, 'Nama saya [my name is] John Wilson' in Jawi. He bowled me over. We thought then of the British as being the supreme power. They wouldn't want to mix with us. But here was this orang puteh [white man] who was able to relate to us."

Burgess was more liberal than J D Howell, the headmaster whose stern but amiable features still stare down from the gallery of portraits in the college's Hargreaves Hall. It was with Howell that Burgess clashed over the expulsion of a pupil who had been caught in a compromising position with a girl. The monitor of his form, Abdul Rahim Ismail, headed a group who went to complain to Burgess. "We told him that we thought it was unjustified," says Rahim. "He seemed receptive."

The incident is recorded in Time for a Tiger, and Crabbe, just like Burgess, ends up being transferred to a different establishment on the east coast of Malaya for challenging the headmaster's authority. But it doesn't seem likely that Burgess could have stayed at the Malay College for long in any case. Crabbe spurns the Iblis Club, full of planters and colonial officers, in favour of local kedais (roadside shops), but Burgess went further.

Ariff drives me to the location of the local toddy shop. Now a patch of wasteland, it is just across the road from the Idris Club (for Iblis, read Idris, named after a former sultan of the state), so his presence there could hardly have been discreet. Burgess makes it sound like a local drinking spot, but Ariff corrects me. "The government used to create areas to control the consumption of toddy [a low-grade, noxious coconut beer]. It was not a place a normal Malayan would go - it was for Indian coolies. He must have been really desperate to go there."

Lynne's behaviour was also the subject of talk. "We hardly ever saw her, but we suspected she was drunk most of the time," says Ariff. In Little Wilson and Big God, the first instalment of his memoirs, Burgess makes much of their mutual infidelity. I ask Ariff about this. "There was a rumour that a Malay teacher was carrying on with her," he says. "We thought he must be blind - she was terrible!" As for Burgess himself: "I don't think that women were ever his weakness. In fact we worried about his sexual preference sometimes."

Burgess's crude boasting and imagery in his writings were one of the aspects that later upset the locals. In Time for a Tiger, the state of Perak is called "Lanchap", a slang word for masturbate, while in the second novel, The Enemy in the Blanket, the state of Kelantan becomes "Kenching" - urine. The claims he makes in his autobiography - "I had better say a little now about love-making in the East" - are both ludicrous and distasteful. He says that he had an affair with Rahimah, a Malay widow, in Kuala Kangsar, and gifts this liaison to his fictional alter ego, Crabbe; but none of his former pupils remember hearing about this. Whether the sexual adventures were pure inventions on his part (and it would be an unwise reader who takes Burgess's autobiography as pure fact), the unpleasant tone is captured by his description of a visit he makes to a prostitute in Singapore on his arrival: "I entered her and entered the territory."

So was Burgess just using those he met? "Little did we suspect that we were being studied, spied, jotted down in his notes to be moulded, changed and used as characters in his books," says Suleiman. "He probably did not care much about teaching, about the college or the students - unlike Mr Howell. He was just passing through on his journey into the literary world."

There is undoubtedly affection for the Malays in Burgess's writings. But there was plenty that they would not be so pleased to read. "The Chinese and Indians, who did the work of the Federation while the Malays watched the coconuts fall, feared independence, which would put power entirely into the hands of the Malays, a very xenophobic lot... Work had always been an alien substance to the Malays." He described Malay as "a primitive language", and wrote of Brunei, also an ethnically Malay state: "The territory was crawling with gormless tungkus and rajas, princes of the blood." In an area where the royal families are still regarded with great respect (and are also the heads of religion in their states), this was not going to go down terribly well.

Burgess returned to Malaysia (the country was renamed in 1963 after the Federation of Malaya joined with the Borneo states of Sarawak and Sabah, and, briefly, Singapore) to film a segment for the BBC series Writers and Places in 1980. "We met up at the Royal Ipoh Club," remembers Ariff, "where my wife and I entertained him for dinner. We saw quite a bit of each other during the few days he was in Ipoh, and he was even kind enough to appraise a short play my wife had written for the radio.

"I was all set to reinstall him on my pedestal. That is, until I witnessed his live BBC interview, in which he proceeded to paint a very disparaging picture of Malaysia since independence." A furious Burgess is seen unable to make himself understood when speaking Malay to a waitress. "The country and I," he says finally to camera, "have nothing to say to each other."

Burgess always had a reactionary streak, and he disliked the way that Malaysia had embraced modernity and consumerism, just as he had been unimpressed with the changes he found in Britain on his return from the East in 1959. But he did forge a connection with his class at the Malay College. "I liked the senior boys whom I taught, and felt that a rapport was growing," he said of the class of '55, describing them as "delicate of perception".

"We admired Wilson, almost to the point of loving him," remembers Ariff. Suleiman describes him as "a giant... it would be a rare privilege indeed to know the man." Burgess was particularly close to Rahim, who appears briefly as three different characters in the Malayan Trilogy. The pair were drawn together by a mutual love of music (Burgess was a prolific, if mediocre, amateur composer). "When I told him that I was attempting a composition, he asked to have a look," says Rahim, who still has the piano arrangement Burgess wrote to accompany his tune. He also has his report from the third term of 1954. "A promising student," begins Burgess's comments, "equipped with considerable intelligence. He must, however, overcome a certain indolence if he is to succeed."

Rahim chuckles. Many of Burgess's pupils were successful. Rahim is a retired diplomat. Suleiman is among the country's most prominent property developers. One who was the year ahead, Abdullah Ahmad, went on to be a minister and the Malaysian Special Envoy to the UN. A well-known political commentator, Abdullah ascribes his non-conformism to Burgess's influence (a double-edged compliment, perhaps, as it was this that led him to be detained under the country's Internal Security Act from 1976-1981).

Most of Malaysia has forgotten about Anthony Burgess. No plaque to his memory stands at the Malay College. The cupboard at the Royal Ipoh Club formerly dedicated to Burgess has been removed. "You should write about that other author who came here," a man at the bar tells me. "That very famous Irish writer - Graham Greene." But however much Malaya served Burgess's purpose, in some small way he also returned the favour to the people he called "the Malays, a brown, handsome, lazy, wholly attractive race".

"When my father read the trilogy," remembers Rahim, "he said, 'this man understands us and our surroundings. Unlike all the other English writers.' And he specifically mentioned Somerset Maugham. I think the same." For Anthony Burgess, the strange, prickly, egomaniacal man who saw "the tropics as normality and the temperate zones as the locale for suicidal dementia", there could be no greater compliment. For it was in Malaya, as he "sweated and was happy to sweat", that Little Wilson became Big Burgess.

Sholto Byrnes stayed at the Kuala Lumpur Hilton: www.hilton.co.uk; www.tourism malaysia.gov.my