Earthly Powers (Burgess, Anthony) [Paperback]

Anthony Burgess (Author)

Book Description

Series: Burgess, Anthony | Publication Date: November 18, 1993

Book jacket/from back: Anthony Burgess has long been regarded as one of the most original and daring writers of our time. In Earthly Powers, Burgess has writtena book rich with astonishing powers and surprising events.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Burgess's ambitious study of 20th-century history centers on the stormy relationship between an effete, popular novelist and a Faustian priest.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Anthony Burgess was born in Manchester in 1917. He served in the army from 1940 to 1954 before becoming a colonial education officer. It was while he held this post that doctors told him he would die, and he decided to try to live by writing. A prolific and respected author, Burgess died in 1993. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 608 pages
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf (November 18, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786700262
• ISBN-13: 978-0786700264
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.6 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,883,390 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Anthony Burgess (25th February 1917-22nd November 1993) was one of the UK's leading academics and most respected literary figures. A prolific author, during his writing career Burgess found success as a novelist, critic, composer, playwright, screenwriter, travel writer, essayist, poet and librettist, as well as working as a translator, broadcaster, linguist and educationalist. His fiction also includes NOTHING LIKE THE SUN, a recreation of Shakespeare's love-life, but he is perhaps most famous for the complex and controversial novel A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, exploring the nature of evil. Born in Manchester, he spent time living in Southeast Asia, the USA and Mediterranean Europe as well as in England, until his death in 1993.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An unjustly neglected masterwork, May 28, 2000

By 

Randall Ivey "Randall" (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Earthly Powers (Burgess, Anthony) (Paperback)

Burgess's 1980 EARTHLY POWERS, like Styron's SOPHIE'S CHOICE(published around the same time), hearkens back to the grand 19th century novels of Dickens, Balzac, and Galdos. It is a novel the reader enters and inhabits, a world of its own.

Kenneth Toomey, supposedly modeled on Somerset Maugham, is a middling range popular novelist who finds himself in the midst of some of the great literary and social maelstroms of the twentieth century. He knows everyone - Churchill, James Joyce, John Maynard Keynes; you name them, Toomey has sipped tea with them - and gets involved with everything - censorship trials and ancient voodoo, for instance; he even has a brush with the Jim Jones cult through one of his nieces.

Critics carped at the book for its lack of focus, but it has a definite focus: the twentieth century. Toomey's not a great artist, but he is a great observer, and through him Burgess gives us the full sweep of the twentieth century, its follies and its glories (but more folly than glory). In the past, English literature has had an Age of Shakespeare and an Age of Johnson. In the future critics and historians will judge the late twentieth century as the Age of Burgess. EARTHLY POWERS will help solidify that certainty.

Read it.

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Faith, duty, home, May 9, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Earthly Powers (Burgess, Anthony) (Paperback)

I rate this Burgess' best novel, having bought it at least three times! It's a big, heavy book, so I take it to the beach it, read it, and bin it before leaving, to save luggage weight. Then I realise I need to reread it...

Burgess' narrator namedrops his way shamelessly through the twentieth century as he tells the story of his own life and the intertwined fortunes of his brother-in-law, Carlo Campanati, a Catholic priest whose dearest ambition is to "make Pope". It's a huge sweep of history and human times to cover, but Burgess centres it around faith, duty, and home, and makes it look easy.

One warning: he is *very* erudite, so you'll need a dictionary at times. I reckon I have a good vocabulary, but I had no idea what a "venerean strabismus" was. It's up there with "Brideshead Revisited" as a "foodie" book too. One of the beaches I read this on was in Goa, and I was gagging for the Italian meatballs and "cold, black wine" which I couldn't get over there!

Stylistically it's self-conscious; the narrator intervenes frequently to remind you he's writing his autobiography. It's not a major problem, and in fact it's necessary. The first time you notice this is the absolutely show-stopping opening paragraph involving archbishops and catamites (reach for your dictionary if you don't know)...!

Did I mention this book is frequently very, very funny? I cried laughing at the later scenes featuring the shoplifting bisexual Nazi.

Warmly recommended; just don't expect Clockwork Orange!

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Anthony Burgess' Neglected Epic, July 20, 2001

By 

Ricky Hunter (New York City, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Earthly Powers (Burgess, Anthony) (Paperback)

This novel, Earthly Powers, by Anthony Burgess from 1980 strips bare the twentienth century and turns its skeleton into a wonderful narrative stream inhabited by two beautifully realized characters, Kenneth Toomey, novelist, and Don Carlo, eventually the Pope. Everyone and everything of importance in the last century becomes a part of the mix without ever clogging the story, which remains clearly focused with the clever use of the fictional creations. This book is an epic that truly deserves that title and it will give the reader many hours to reading pleasure. A wonderful reading experience.