Customer Reviews

Earthly Powers (Burgess, Anthony)

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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.

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!

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.

...First thing for me, though, is that the book combines the intellectual rewards of "serious" lit' with the more popular joys of any "thumping good read"! Critical analysis can be (and probably has been) made in great depth, if you're so inclined, from the thematics of the plot to close exegesis of the imagery, the syntax, the sound, the intricacies and subtleties of the prose: polymath Burgess is certainly up to any level of detailed appreciation, being more than capable in that area himself. But this is so much more than just a "clever-clever" exercise. Burgess rejoices in language as the virtuoso rejoices in musicianship: that is, he makes brilliance and insight accessible, entertaining and enlightening with the same effortless, but technically expert and hard-won, ease as Mozart or Shakespeare.

So there's that erudite, piquant, moving, hilarious voice to recommend Earthly Powers, just for starters. Then consider the story: well, it's about Good and Evil in the Twentieth Century, right? OK, it's about the Devil and his possession, at some time or other, of just about anyone who ever tried to do right, let alone the weak and downright villainous. Satan is even shown to act - and occasionally speak, if you pay attention - through the "author" himself .

This narrator, Kenneth Toomey, is what Earthly Powers is "about" on the simplest level: his outrageous cultural, religious, literary and sexual adventures amongst the movers and shakers, fictitious and real, of the modern age. The Toomey persona is clearly close to Burgess in many ways - he's witty, self-deprecating, eloquent, tortured, magnanimous, irascible. Very "real," then; but also brilliantly imagined - witness more than one glib critic being fooled into writing of Burgess as "homosexual" (wrong) on the strength of this most convincing of personae.

Earthly Powers is exciting and entertaining in so many ways, from sheer quality of authorship through to scope of plot and impact of incident. Lovely characters, too. It has true and important things to say about human behaviour; profound messages about love, respect and inhumanity. Please read it.

It seems presumptuous to be definitive in the area of literature. But every now and then there is a book, such as Earthly Powers, that compells one to reach for superlatives. This is a masterful example of the literary novel, one that frequently makes its appearance on the 'top-ten' lists of 'all time greats' as compiled by those who have made it their business to read as much as possible.Burgess lavished effort on this, setting out to create a masterpiece, and he succeeded without ever forgetting the novelist's duty to perform, above all, as a storyteller for his audience.And what a story he tells!This is in essence a trip through the Twentieth Century that encompasses as many aspects as possible of what defined the era. All is seen through the eyes of an intelligent, sensitive, and sometimes bitterly confused man, Kenneth Twomey. As such, the story is his, and spans some eighty odd years.Burgess is careful to weave his tale as engagingly as he can. Despite verdant vocabulary - always contextually perfect - the pages flick past at great speed. We are not subjected to many of the more conventional literary devices utilised to pull readers in. Instead we are involved through the sheer pathos and variety of the world and age that Kenneth, Oddysean-like, must navigate.We are introduced to dozens of countries and a veritable mob of characters, none of whom ever blur or become confused in our mind, because they are drawn with such easy clarity - I have encountered very few personalities in contemporary fiction as well-realised as these.The themes that run through the book are many; love, God, war, identity, suffering, the creative impulse, guilt, peversion, philosophy, nobility and evil. Only a few of these are made obvious - the book, after all, is meant to reflect life. The rest are perched delicately for us to discern between the lines. We do not find ourselves subjected to the author shoving his own particular brand of morality down our throats; a trait rarely avoided even by luminaries within the fiction field. Burgess is far too modest to think that he should discern for our benefit the differences between right and wrong on the grand scale - that is left entirely to us. With this in mind, he is at pains to create a mood of ubiquitous evil hanging over large portions of the novel, an evil which is hard to define specifically, and it is the reader who must try to make sense of it, as themes and plots grow and elaborate over decades and continents. He does this with consummate skill.If I have been vague it is because it is impossibly difficult to get into the fabric of Earthly Powers in such a short space. It takes on far too much to lend itself to summarisation. One can only keep repeating, 'This is a masterpiece; truly a masterpiece.' Why it never received the critical acclaim it so assuredly deserved will forever remain a dreadful inditement of a literary establishment jealous of possibly its most talented virtuoso. So many critics have such petty and venal motivations. By the way, the opening line is considered by many to be one of the greatest ever written. "It was the morning of my eighty first birthday and I was in bed with my . . ." Buy it and read for yourself. This one will stay with you for years. Unless of a most violently parochial and small-minded disposition, I cannot envisage anyone failing to be thrilled and awed by a book so gigantic in theme and substance.

This book, like much of Burgesss's output, is sui-generis. Yes, our narrator, Toomey, by Burgess's own admission, is based on Somerset Maugham, but he is also based on Burgess himself----For those who missed the Burgessian word play here: "Two of me". The word play is one of the things I delighted in about this book, so is the arcane vocabulary. For readers who detest fun with abstruse linguistics this is Not the book for you----For all others, you'll love coming across, time and again, words like (off the top of my head) "cecity".

But, as almost all reviewers have noted, this book is also a kind of roman a clef of historic personages, literary and otherwise, populating the Twentieth Century - literary and otherwise - from Henry James to Jim Jones. This effect does, as another reviewer has noted, become tedious after a bit, as does the theological casuistry strewn throughout the book, another one of Burgess's - as he calls himself, a "lapsed Catholic" - obsessions. He once told critic Harold Bloom, "I'll see you in Limbo, Bloom!" - But I digress. At their worst, these parts come across as preachy. - Burgess gave a 1985 interview with Donald Swain (to which you can listen online at Wired for Books) in which he repeats verbatim several points Toomey makes in his Wodehousian broadcast for the Nazis herein. It's just a tad off-putting. But Joyce, Burgess's greatest literary influence, can be off-putting and Jesuitical at times too.

So, I'm ready to forgive Burgess/Toomey this theological muddle in light of the splendid, erudite dialogues and cutting wit that permeate the book from first page to last. This book truly is a swan song for literacy and art. As Toomey/Burgess says in the early going:

"I believed that writers were fine people and the legislators of the world and so on, but I was already desperately out of date. The future belonged to the universal eye, to be tricked and overfed with crude images; it did not belong to the imagination."

And, well, look around you.


Toomey has as the tentative title for this narrative (revealed in the last few pages of the book) Confabulations, a title I like much better than Earthly Powers. Perhaps it's what Burgess wanted to call it himself. But I don't know this as a fact. So, I'll simply appropriate it for my review title-----and trust that it incurs no unintended consequences.

As the venerable English reviewer Peter Marcus noted, this is Burgess' masterpiece. While "A Clockwork Orange" is the better known book (chiefly because of the film - which most people know of but few have seen),"Earthly Powers" is without doubt the finer work. Huge in scope, covering a multitude of decades, this extraordinary acheivement is one of the few truly epic novels that actually manages to sustain the interest constantly. There is no point in explaining about Ken Toomey, Geoffrey, Hortense, Carlo and Domenico Campanati (not pronounced Campa-neighty) and the host of other characters which litter this superlative piece of literature. Their various appeals become plain as day to even the casual reader - which it is very difficult to be when faced with a book as challenging, humourous, and rewarding as this. I, too, spit on the so-called "literary" establishment who overlooked this book in favour of the frothy tripe they awarded honours to. However, so debased are the awards by overlooking this novel that, paradoxically, I am now glad Burgess' genius is not sullied and soiled by association with such scandalous ruffians as the awardsmen truly are. I'll stop now, and you'll click on the bit that says... buy, buy, buy! Or, do what I did, and get it from your local library, saving time and money.

It simply astounds me that, while much of Burgess remains in print, this novel, which together with A Clockwork Orange is his very best, is out of print, and downright difficult to find.
Like several reviewers, I took the time to re-read this massive text, having first read it over twenty years ago. The narrator is a homosexual, at relative peace with his proclivity, but not the price extracted by societal mores. Still, as one astute reviewer noted, this is a novel of unintended consequences. Thus, the novel's protagonist, Kenneth Toomey, is ultimately aligned with the most conservative elements of the Catholic church, indeed, becomes, through the marriage of his sister, a much maligned member of a prominent Catholic family, one member of which advances considerably through the Vatican hierarchy. Between the pages of this novel, Burgess manages to sweep through the 20th century, the gradual trends and the cataclysmic changes. To be sure, the book can grow tedious in parts, especially when Mr. Toomey is describing any number of operatic or dramatic plots on which he's involved as a writer (his vocation). That is a small price to pay for a novel as successfully ambitious and sweeping as this one. It deserves a new edition. After all, the twentieth century appears poised to cast a long shadow.

Earthly Powers is the sort of novel that could have been released as a series of shorter novels quite easily, with a sense of great allies and villains recurring and departing. The novel is told from the viewpoint of Kenneth Toomey, gay writer of songs and books, as he lurches through the 20th Century on uncertain legs. On his way he recounts in vivid detail his spectatorship of the First and Second World Wars, his run-ins with people both fictional and real (Pope Carlo Campanati, Il Duce, the Fuhrer, and Jakob Strehler, to name but a few), and the remarkable recurring effects of religion upon his life and those of others. Funny and thought-provoking throughout, Earthly Powers spans a tale some seventy years in length, and by the end of the novel the reader has acquired a sense of fate's heavy hand and cosmic justice (or abuse thereof).

If I were to venture any criticism of the book whatsoever, it would be that the author is almost too brilliant for his audience. With his fictional masterpiece "A Clockwork Orange", Burgess has a definite message to proclaim, but here the enjoyment of the book would appear to rest more in the sublime comic references to other literary sources - something which can alienate and try the patience of lesser mortals.

I felt an overwhelming sense of sorrow and desperation at the storyteller's old age and ill treatment by the world, I joined in his wonder at the curative powers of the Pope, I was awed in the presence of Heinrich Himmler and Benito Mussolini, but I felt that there was much more going on in Toomey's narration than mere facts: I felt that there was some underlying message which was vaguely hinted at, referred to, tantalizingly glimpsed but never fully revealed. And perhaps because of the relative inaccessibility of the novel, and because of its potentially unplumbable depths, I reached the end of the book (whereupon Ken Toomey, 80+ years of age, finally lies down to rest with his beautiful sister) with a sense of matters unconcluded.

The ! novel is certainly very well written and enjoyable if the reader is a deep thinker, polyglot, or well-read, but being none of the above I must confess that Earthly Powers was a step down from good old Alex and his 'droogs' in Clockwork Orange.

Burgess's best novel. Food for the gods: watch as Toomey's memory exfoliates in hideous comedy through the demented twentieth century. Love, music, movies, linguistics, James Joyce, Nazis, Dante, & Shakespeare. An incredible cast.