The category was pioneered in the nineteenth century, with Byron's Don Juan and Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, and matured in the twentieth century, with works such as Derek Walcott's Omeros. While such novels are indeed written in verse, with its different rhythmic implications, they are also much like modern novels. They have strong narratives, strive for mimetic realism, and focus on human agency.
Byrne, the story of one Michael Byrne and his progeny, told by a hack journalist in five chapters of differing meters divided into stanzas, qualifies as a novel in this sense. However, the book goes beyond this definition in an interesting way, which only emphasizes its distance from conventional poetic forms.
Byrne's stanzas almost always end periodically, with a natural pause. Yet the book contains other “visual” elements that cannot be realized as pauses – or anything else – when read aloud.
One such feature of Anthony Burgess's style is the way he ends verses with particles or words split between syllables. The clash between phrases and the metrical structure draws attention away from the rhyme scheme, and also, at times, helps complete some difficult rhymes. For example:
November thirtieth, feast of St. Andrew.
He limped from Green Park tube. The air was tepid.
Unseasonable warmth possessed the land. Rheu-
Matically wincing but intrepid
He made for Curzon Street. His bare right hand drew
A hanky out, to wipe. Westward, a lepid-
Opterous sky, filigree, polychrome,
Called secretaries, sparrows, salesmen home. (page 48)