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Summary: One of the best novels of the 20th century...out of print?
Review: "Earthly Powers" is a marvelous meditation on destiny, social construction, social climbing, fate and faith ; its Somerset Maugham-based narrator gives us an unflinching view of life's paradoxes amidst a series of wonderful, unforgettable passages and characters. Get ready for a jaw-dropping ending.
This book is, say, one of the ten best novels of the last century (and a lot easier to read than Gravity's Rainbow or Ulysses). In a better world, it would never be out of print.
Rating: 
Summary: And then there was Burgess...
Review: 'Earthly Powers' was the type of book with which I made friends. It is a thick, dense work filled with sharp characterization and sparkling dialogue. Certainly, a reader doesn't sit down to read this work in a few hours, or a day, but is required to make a more considerable commitment to the novel. Burgess knows this, and fulfills his end of the bargain. His 'Earthly Powers' isn't just a big book, such as Mailer's unwieldy 'Harlot's Ghost,' but is a story so great and grand that it simply requires the number of pages which it inhabits. When I was finished, I was sad to put it down.
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Summary: Burgess Power Personified
Review: ...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.
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Summary: A twentieth century panorama
Review: Anthony Burgess presents Toomey, an ageing homosexual writer clearly modelled on W. Somerset Maugham, as a lens through which the events (both glorious and odious) of the twentieth century unfold. The two world wars, the rise of Nazism and Fascism and the growth of black nationalism are all touched upon in this sprawling tapestry. Characteristically of Burgess, the writing displays reserves of linguistic mastery and invention, in its polyglotal puns, clever wordplay and dazzling wit. Toomey's conversations with actual personages, especially in the literary world, such as Joyce, Hemingway, Faulkner, Havelock Ellis and Henry James are delightful and often hilarious, though they barely descend to the level of caricature. What bogs the narrative down, though, are the interminable theological discussions on homosexuality, freedom of the will and sin (one of the lifelong preoccupations of the Catholic nonbeliever Burgess) which sometimes obtrude too noticeably on the plot, despite being integral to it.
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Summary: Genius. Vintage Burgess.
Review: Anthony Burgess was an author who always believed that literary fiction still must tell a story, rather than merely demonstrating the writer's wit and linguistic virtuosity. Earthly Powers has the bizarre and ingenious premise of an aging novelist, now retired, living in Malta who is approached by the Catholic Church to record a miracle performed by the late Pope so that the Pope, one Carlo Campanati, may be canonized. The plot is occasionally submerged, but Burgess manages to keep the digressions interesting, especially with such people as Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Wyndham Lewis, and James Joyce making guest appearances, and the fact that these vignettes arise naturally but not as consequences of the plot, make the story all the more surprising. The story is a masterpiece of Burgess' tragicomic wit: his characters' humanity is shown as they suffer the most petty humiliations at the hands of absolute ingrates--their tragedy resides in the fact that most of human experience, and that which we hold most dear, is incomprehensible to others, and ultimately results in, at best, a joke. My favorite scenes include the beginning, in which Mr. Toomey relates: "It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me", (sic) as well as the scene in which Toomey meets Ford and Pound, gives a lecture to the students at the Midwestern college, and pretty much any scene involving the formidable Don Carlo Campanati. No other writer that I've read, with the possible exceptions of Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis, write prose as supple and deft as Burgess', and I've never read anyone funnier.
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Summary: Here is God's plenty!
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: An unjustly neglected masterwork
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: An unjustly neglected masterwork
Review: 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.
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Summary: Unbelievably rich and rewarding novel on all counts
Review: Earthly Powers has long been one of my favourite novels and I used to make a point of re-reading it at least once every couple of years, so rich are the themes and content, so immediate are the characters. Ken Toomey has to be one of the great literary creations of the twentieth century and one can't help feeling that a sensibility such as he represents is something that is truly a thing of the past in our intellectually impoverished era of MacDonalds, Play Stations and our overweening, 24/7 globally-telecast preoccupation with whether 'the Fed' intends to raise or lower interest rates. Much criticised during his life (presumably because his enormous and irreverant intelligence always defied neat classification) Burgess's death was a tremendous loss to the world literary scene. For an iconoclast, he remains (for me at least) one of the shining icons of the literary endeavour.
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Summary: Burgess at his most epic
Review: 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.
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