Rating: 
Summary: A very, very good book
Review: Here Burgess really get to describe what's the world like. We get new knowledge about mankind. He is also very well aquainted with the language. He shows the knowledge about the world and the people living in the world. I sure recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: Faith, duty, home
Review: 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!
Rating:
Summary: A cynic story with a beautiful diversion.
Review: I'm stunned that Burgess managed to write a biography which isn't even subtile, when it comes to Toomey, that really's embodied. Amazing, since Burgess only hid the authors name behind " Toomey ". Brilliant old chap, I yield herefrom further claims of knowledge.
Rating:
Summary: Burgess' Own Favorite
Review: In what was to become one of the highlights of my years as an undergraduate in Boston, I was invited to spend a quiet evening with Mr. Burgess in his room at the Ritz-Carlton. My excitement was all the more intense due to the fact of my being in the middle of reading Earthly Powers, and had some questions about what I was reading.
The book had been out a couple of years, but it was enough to convince (at least) Burgess that it was his most complete work to date. I would submit that it was, in fact, his most complete (written) work before or since.
He, however, considered himself to be primarily a composer, although he would freely state that literature was superior in that it was words, meaning AND music.
Earthly Powers was all three. You are privy to his omnipresent language games, but learn about the 20th Century through some of the widest eyes of the century.
But the musical score which underlies the work puts in in a different class altogether.
Burgess was a man with great gifts. Here is one of his finest gifts to us.
Dave Beckwith
Founder/President
Charlotte Internet Society
Rating: 
Summary: One of the best first lines ever
Review: It has been almost twenty years since I first read this novel. Two things stand out. One, the story emblazoned in my mind the power of the principle of unintended outcomes, especially the evil results of good deeds. And second, it has an opening sentence that I have remembered to this day: "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." Still makes me laugh after all this time.
Rating:
Summary: AN ENORMOUS ACHIEVEMENT
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: A tour de force of 20th century power, earthly and otherwise
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Grab this one if you can
Review: Of all of Burgess' books, this is the one I recommend to anyone with intelligence and a sense of humor; I considered him the greatest living writer in the english language during his tenure here, and have read -- and collected -- most of his output. This is the one he should be judged by and remembered for. If all you've ever heard of was "Clockwork Orange", take a chance on this winner of a novel.
Rating:
Summary: A writer's life
Review: The novel is also enjoyable for the casual modesty with which Burgess's narrator, Kenneth Toomey, describes his career as a writer, sprinkling his anecdotes about publishers, agents, and literary encounters with poems and snatches of witty song lyrics, as well as the gender-bending rewrite of the creation story in Genesis. The quotations support Toomey's own claim that, despite his fame, he is essentially a writer of popular novels and light musical verse whose most serious book was actually written by someone else but published under his name with his permission. The novel's underlying tinge of melancholy makes it a true elegy to a life of adventure, achievement, suffering, loss, and innate, enduring dignity.
Rating:
Summary: The best opening sentence ever!
Review: The opening sentence of this novel will propel you into a fierce examination of human morality and the existence of good and evil in terms that are recognizable and entertaining. Dont' miss it!
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