n  Bettie's Booksn

A massive novel written in the form of quasi-memoir of a fictional Maugham-like author who is taking in totality of his life from old age. A fascinating literary romp thru the 20th century, which features many famous personages as characters. Overall I'd say this book is probably a little too ambitious, but it's still a very effective work. Recommended for anyone interested in 20th century European literature or Burgess' work. Great stuff.

It has been a couple of years since I first bought and read this hefty piece of literature. I had read A Clockwork Orange and Mozart and the Wolf Gang by Anthony Burgess previously and had two greatly different but equally unique and liberating experiences with both. Seeing this fairly hefty novel (almost 500,000 words) on a bookshelf with reviews describing it as Burgess's magnum opus and one of the best British and Commonwealth texts of the last 25 years peaked my interest and I immediately purchased it.

To give a bit more context, I read Earthly Powers in the same summer that I read F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby as well as Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights for the first time and closely followed those by the dizzyingly inventive House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. It had been a good summer for literature for me, perhaps the best I'd had reading for pleasure. And I was to top it all off with Earthly Powers, and I can say with a straight face that Earthly Powers surpassed all of the aforementioned beautifully crafted and brilliant pieces of writing.

The novel is narrated by Kenneth Toomney, a very successful novelist who rubs shoulders with the likes of Fitzgerald and Joyce in Parisian bars. On the morning of his 81st birthday, while in bed with his Catamite, Toomney is visited by an Archbishop looking to involve Toomney in the canonization into sainthood of one Pope Gregory, formerly known as Carlo Campanati, who happens to be Toomney's brother in-law. The novel then proceeds to tell Toomney's life story, how he came to know the to-be Pope, and all of Toomney's interactions with the events of the 20th Century, spanning from the First World War until the 80s.

The most prevalent complaint with this novel is that it seemingly lacks focus. It may appear that way to some as it spans decades and takes place in dozens of locations across the globe and involves so many events that could have warranted their own novel. However the novel is brilliantly symmetrical, with the central event being a miraculous healing of a terminally ill young boy done by Campanati and witnessed by Toomney. The whole story, although seemingly meandering, is focused on the nature of power, and whether or not good and evil even truly exists. There are so many thematic threads strewn throughout this work that one could write books and books of critical analysis on each topic and yet Earthly Powers never feels cluttered. It discusses the nature of true art. It discusses violence. It discusses oppression. It discusses religious faith. It discusses gender and homosexuality. One of the most compelling threads, and perhaps the most prominent narrative arc is Toomney's lifelong struggle between his homosexuality and his very real belief in God. Burgess uses Toomney's struggle to both demonstrate the need for and inherent problems with religious faith without ever being preachy or even, really, claiming to have answers to how one should relate to a God who your supposed to love but whose will and design for an individual life is so often unclear. Earthly Powers somehow demonstrates corruption in all facets of all societies and how some corruption seems less or more tolerable than others in spite of it all being essentially the same. There are so many more thematic threads I could pull at but this paragraph is getting very long, and what I'm trying to say here is that Burgess somehow observed the entire spectrum of human issues over the 20th century and placed it elegantly into one sweeping novel.

But it is not just these thematic threads tying Earthly Powers together. It is its characters. Kenneth Toomney is an abundantly complex narrator with a plethora of competing motivations and changing world views. Toomney's narration is among Burgess's best, easily rivaling Alex DeLarge of A Clockwork Orange. It is clear here that Burgess is at his peak of linguistic inventiveness. For some readers, this will make Earthly Powers a difficult read, but for those willing to put in the effort, Burgess's writing style is so memorable that you will find yourself returning to pages not for a favorite passage, but for a single brilliant word choice. Toomney is at times hilarious and at others heartrendingly poignant, but always filled with a sharp tongued wit. Toomney's family is likewise complex, each member having its own strong motivations and characterizations. The dialogue throughout this novel is so fresh and natural. Not a single character feels cliche, incomplete, or unnecessarily inserted and there are a host of them both real historical figures and fictional creations, and in a couple of cases fictional versions of real historical figures.

The crown jewel of the novel's achievements is Carlo Campanati. I have never read a character more enthralling than this fat gambling religious figure. Campanati is the second focal point of the novel, next to our narrator. He is at times a beloved and compassionate character that holds families together and triumphantly defies tyranny and at other times a cold philosophical giant as frightening as Cormac McCarthy's Judge. Reading a scene involving Campanati was always followed by putting down the book and considering the universe itself, sometimes with warm reassuring delight and at others with cold existential horror. Campanati's rise to the papacy is likewise with duality, sometimes heroic and sometimes with brutal political maneuvering. His actions and words are central to everything this novel is about and his relationship with Toomney echoes the narrator's relationship with deity itself. Campanati is absolutely fascinating and I would recommend this novel on that merit alone.

Earthly Powers has become my favorite novel and has caused me to delve deep into Burgess's canon of work. I look forward to reading it many times over the span of my life and I'm sure it will never lose its hold on me.

Some people really like this big old thing. But it was yet another in the tedious catalogue of huge masculine overbearing egomaniacal penis novels about a Big Man like, say, I the Supreme or Illywacker or Gould's Book of Fish or The Book of Evidence or Mein Kampf - boy, there's a lot of em. And it's the egomaniac's voice who narrates it. So you volunteer to have the guy bending your inner ear for page after page and no break. Maybe some readers channel their inner masochist and lie back and wallow in the hurling of the testosterone. Not me. I chucked it at the wall quite quickly. I could hear its fans screeching and clawing each other in genuine horror. But really, wordsmithery and large braininess will not save a book from the wall-hurl. The tone of voice was like the clench of rat-claws on a biscuit tin lid and I chose not to have that particular voice jabbering and gibbering and mewling in my ear for 600 pages.

Like Burgess himself, a bit pompous, a bit pretentious, not as clever or profound as it thinks it is but still sporadically entertaining and funny.

n  Heritage album cover artn


1. MUSICAL ACCOMPANIMENT

href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tZ_uwDlmPY">
n  Providence - GSYBE!n


2. THE STORY

Writer Kenneth Toomey, 81 y.o., is requested to write a biography on Carlo Campanati, that is, a relative, also the former pope.
The background of this curious hagiography consists in the fate of family Toomey and family Campanati during the 20th century.
Also, Ken Toomey is a homosexual with a knack for bonding with ill-suited partners.


3. EARTHLY POWERS?

I am still wondering about the title. What are these earthly powers, actually ? The State, occasionally denying your being yourself, spoliating and expropriating you once in a while?
Money, twisting the game of social relations?
Celebrity and the endless representation it entails?
Universal chance, making the world a giant roulette, be it spending an evening in the casino or attending papal election?
Reproduction, pitting generations against one another?
Cults, ethnical communities? Discord induced and fostered by nationalisms and movements claiming territories in the name of a given ethnical group (pangermanism, panafricanism)?
The will to reform, degrading itself into a series of subpar, warped realizations perverting a generous idea (Communism, ecumenical Catholicism...)?

Against what kind of spiritual powers, then, are these earthly powers in deadly conflict?
The moral establishment?
French-born Mrs Toomey's Catholic faith?
The Catholic Church, backing traditional order and a vision of world's unity of their own?
A world split in between those obeying and those in command, neverchanging places according to Toomey?
Val Wrigley's uprightness and purported righteousness in the forwarding of the Queer cause?
Domenico's dedication to writing music genuinely embodying his feelings about the absence of kindly Providence?
Noncommital Kenneth, the writer who never loved anybody but his great love in Malaya and his sister?
Umilta's renunciation to the outside world, wasting away her days in the convent?
Carlo's painstaking ascent to power, a willing, well-meaning orphan, fueling his relentless energy with pent-up carnal apetites towards his brother Domenico's wife? The man who won't acknowledge man's drive for evil and power over fellow men for itself?
Disinterested, selfless Tom Toomey?
Perhaps. Still, I guess there is more behind the multifarious forms assumed by power and men harnessing it.


4. A FAMILIAL TRAGEDY

The red line of this novel is likely to be the fall of two families : the Tommeys and the Campanatis.
Mr. and Mrs. Campanati, Rafaelle, Domenico, Umilta and Carlo.
Mr. and Mrs. Toomey, Tom, Kenneth, Hortense.

As Kenneth first meets Mr. Campanati, the latter bedridden and senile, Mrs Campanati is on her way to be diagnosed with cancer, later to kill herself in a thwarted murder attempt. Uncompromising Raffaele will get retribution from the Sicilian mafia in Chicago ; Domenico, infertile, an author of light music, forsaken ; cold Umilta, hiding herself from the world in the convent ; Carlo, abandonned by his parents, growing into a short-tempered papa of everybody he once meets.
Tom undergoes sickness and emotional misery, Kenneth goes into exile, Hortense never succeeds in emancipating herself from her family ties, yet outlives all her descendants.


5. LANGUAGE AND NARRATION

This is a curious book.
As soon as you believe you have a frame, a specific form of a narration, a manner of progress - life under the war, life after the war, Kenneth's evolution as a writer,... - another plot thickens : comedy of errors, tragic flaws in the Campanati family,...
The narration shies away from progress and order in his narration and highlights the tiring process of reconstruction and filling underlying the whole book.

By means of a fiction endlessly pointed out, Anthony Burgess gives his text a paradoxical weight, relating fantasized events in his life, itself a prodigious novel. I would say the very fabric of narration in this book is wariness towards all discourses flaunting lifelikeness, all narrations boasting truth.

This is no coincidence is the novel is packed with press clippings, radio declarations and television broadcasts, conferences, letters. No coincidence if the last work by Domenico Campanati is an adaptation of unadaptable Ulysses. I believe that this book extols the power of the text and evidences the all too real power of language structures on societies and their rituals. Sometimes in the flesh when this search is embodied by John and Laura Campanati.

Hence the universal, catholical ambition of this book, a living craze to describe akin to that one witnesses in Ulysses, if a bit tamed.
Hence the reserve, and both regard and skepticism inhabiting Kenneth when he faces words, his refusal to content himself with mastering only one language, one narration.

Do you keep a diary? I do, so all of this is quite familiar to me. The carefulness towards the way you remember past events and the way you put them down.

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6. LITERARY SIBLINGS

For their common extraordinary gambling scenes :
The Gambler - F.M. Dostoevsky
The Gambler

On the matter of the banality of evil:
The Kindly Ones - Jonathan Littell
The Kindly Ones

Because of its unmitigated amazement before the strangeness of the world :
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer - Philip K. Dick
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

For the novel way it deals with a monument of tradition, as the Campanati do in their trades :
The Book of Genesis - Robert Crumb
The Book of Genesis

For its puns and games on point of views :
Exercises in Style - Raymond Queneau
Exercises in Style

For the naughty pen and obvious pleasure in reading :
Ulysses - James Joyce
Ulysses


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Heritage album cover art


1. ACCOMPAGNEMENT

href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tZ_uwDlmPY">
Providence - GSYBE!


2. L'HISTOIRE

L'écrivain Kenneth Toomey écrit une hagiographie étrange sur Carlo Campanati, défunt pape, avec pour toile de fond le destin de deux familles au 20ème siècle, la famille Toomey et la famille Campanati.
Je n'en dis pas plus pour les intéressés, spoilers annoncés plus bas.


3. EARTHLY POWERS, LES PUISSANCES DES TÉNÈBRES ?

Je me pose encore la question de la raison de ce titre. Que sont-ils, ces pouvoirs terrestres ? chtoniens (?), infernaux (?).

Les pouvoirs publics qui vous frustrent d'être ce que vous êtes en public, qui vous spolient, vous exproprient à l'occasion ?
L'argent qui fausse tout le jeu des relations aux autres ?
La célébrité et la représentation perpétuelle qui la suit ?
Le hasard universel qui fait du monde un grand tapis de jeu, qu'il s'agisse d'une soirée au casino ou d'une élection papale au Vatican ?
La gestation qui inscrit les parents et les enfants dans des générations différentes, à l'occasion hostiles et distants ?
La discorde induite par les nationalismes et les mouvements de revendication territoriale ?
La volonté réformatrice qui s'accomplissant se mue en une chaîne d'accomplissements qui dévoient l'idée généreuse à leur origine (Communisme, œcuménisme catholique) ?
Les sectes, les groupes d'appartenance et de sentiments d'appartenance nationale (pangermanisme, panafricanisme) ?

Et face à quelles forces célestes ?
L'establishment moral ?
La foi catholique de Madame Toomey, née française ?
L'Église qui défend les ordres traditionnels et une certaine vision de l'unité où le monde se divise entre ceux qui commandent et ceux qui obéissent, places destinées à ne jamais changer au Royaume-Uni à en croire Kenneth ?
La rectitude et l'intégrité affichés de Val Wrigley le champion improvisé de la cause queer ?
L'investissement, l'implication de Domenico dans l'écriture de pièces qui reflètent son sentiment réel sur l'injustice du monde, sur l'absence de providence bienveillante ?
L'absence d'engagement ou de prise de parti bien nette chez Kenneth, l'écrivain qui n'a jamais aimé que son grand amour en Malaisie à l'exception de sa sœur ?
Le renoncement d'Umilta Campanati, qui finit ses jours en supérieure du couvent ?
La lente ascension au pouvoir de Carlo l'homme de bonne volonté, l'orphelin bien intentionné qui sublime ses appétits charnels envers l'épouse de son frère Domenico ? L'homme qui refuse de voir que l'homme est de lui-même porté au mal ? L'homme qui ne veut rien savoir de l'appétit inné des hommes pour le pouvoir sur leurs semblables ?
Le désintéressement, la modestie, l'abnégation de l'infortuné Tom Toomey ?

Peut-être. Mais je crois bien qu'il y a autre chose derrière toutes ces formes de pouvoir...


4. UNE TRAGÉDIE FAMILIALE

Earthly Powers commence au 81ème anniversaire de Kenneth M. Toomey, le narrateur de ces quelque 650 pages. Le fil rouge de son récit, s'il en faut un, c'est la faillite des familles Toomey et Campanati.
Monsieur et Madame Campanati, Rafaelle, Domenico, Umilta et Carlo.
Monsieur et Madame Toomey, Tom, Kenneth, Hortense.

À sa première rencontre avec Kenneth, Monsieur Campanati est impotent et sénile, Madame Campanati va contracter le cancer et perdre la vie dans une tentative d'assassinat, Raffaele va faire les frais de son intransigeance face à la mafia sicilienne à Chicago ; Domenico, stérile et auteur de compositions légères, désavoué presque toute sa vie ; Umilta renonce au siècle et finit ses jours au couvent, Carlo ne connaît aucun de ses parents et se mue en Papa irascible de tous ceux qu'il rencontre. Tom connaît la maladie et la misère affective, Kenneth l'exil, Hortense ne parvient jamais à s'affranchir de ses liens familiaux et pourtant, toute sa progéniture s'éteint avant elle.


5. LA LANGUE ET LA NARRATION

Ce livre est un objet étrange.
A peine j'ai cru cerner une progression, un ordre, une forme de narration précise (l'évolution de Kenneth en tant qu'écrivain, la vie pendant et après la guerre...) qu'une nouvelle trame se met en place : comédie d'erreurs, défauts tragiques chez tous les membres de la famille Campanati,...
Une progression, un ordre, dont le narrateur lui-même se méfie. Il souligne le laborieux exercice de reconstruction, d'imagination auquel se résume le livre.

Par une fiction sans arrêt soulignée, Anthony Burgess donne un poids paradoxal à son texte, qui rapporte les évènements romancés de sa vie qui est un vrai roman. La vraie narration de ce livre, je dirais bien que c'est la méfiance envers tous les discours qui prétendent réduire la réalité à leur narration.

Ce n'est pas un hasard si le livre est rempli de coupures de presses, d'annonces radiophoniques et télévisées, de conférences, de lettres. Pas un hasard si la dernière œuvre de Domenico Campanati est une adaptation de l'inadaptable Ulysses avec toutes ses formes de discours. Je crois que ce livre consacre le pouvoir du texte, met à jour le pouvoir bien réel des structures de langue sur les sociétés et leurs rites d'intégration, de passage, de mariage... (comme le font John Campanati et Laura).

D'où l'ambition universelle, catholique de ce livre, vraie frénésie de décrire que je rapproche (dans une moindre mesure) de celle de James Joyce dans son Ulysses.

D'où la prudence, la révérence et le scepticisme de Kenneth devant les mots. Son désir assumé de ne pas s'en tenir à une langue, à une narration. D'où son infatigable volonté d'attirer l'attention de son lecteur sur l'activité d'écriture et ce que ça suppose de reconstruction.

Est-ce que vous tenez un journal ? Moi oui, et ça m'est très familier. Ça me parle, cette prudence vis-à-vis de la façon dont on se rappelle les évènements passés.


6. LES LIVRES COUSINS :

Pour ses scènes de pari enfiévré :
Le Joueur - F.M. Dostoïevski
The Gambler
Le Joueur

Pour la question qu'il pose sur la banalité du mal :
Les Bienveillantes - Jonathan Littell
Les Bienveillantes

Pour son étonnement face à l'étrangeté du monde :
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer - Philip K. Dick
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

Pour son traitement nouveau d'un texte immémorial :
The Book of Genesis - Robert Crumb
The Book of Genesis

Pour ses jeux de mots et de points de vue :
Exercices de Style - Raymond Queneau
Exercises in Style

Pour sa plume pas sage et son plaisir de lecture pas boudé :
Ulysses - James Joyce
Ulysses

I’m sorry to say that I couldn’t get through it. Highly recommended to me but I just couldn’t get excited about it after 3 tries. And I think Clockwork Orange is pure genius.

An epic whose power lies as much in its performance as its story. Read the first paragraph and you're hooked.

This book was so unbelievably pompous. It is like burgess sat there with a thesaurus and swapped out average everyday words as often as he could. And sporadically switching languages with no translation. Fortunately I speak French so SOMETIMES I was unaffected by this foolish behaviour. The book didn’t have to be so bad, had he trimmed the fat and not taken himself overly seriously the way he did. If you want to read a challenging book by burgess worth reading read clockwork orange. Skip this one. Unless you are a member of the lgbtq community who struggled with religion.

I think Sam’s articles, with their emphasis of meta-fiction and reality vs. fiction, misrepresent the experience of reading the book. The book is far more like The Winds of War or than The New York Trilogy (Auster) or
This inflation of the body count seems characteristic of a certain over-reaching toward tragedy in the final chapters of the novel. It is as if, aware that the catharsis of tragedy isn’t taking place, Burgess attempts to compensate by increasing the cruelty, arbitrariness, and number of deaths and physical misfortunes.
Burgess’ gift is basically a comic one, though one must construe “comedy” broadly, as Burgess himself did, indicating not just the inducing of laughter, but encompassing Mozartean reconciliation and Dantesque profundity.
The author doesn’t attempt tragedy anywhere else in his oeuvre, so perhaps I am mis-reading his intention here; the over-the- top-ness of the suffering might in some way be intended as a kind of comic undercutting of the tragic. In the end I found myself asking the meta-fictional and theological question: Given the chance to play God to his characters, why does the author choose to be a God of cruelty and injustice? Perhaps the reader’s contemplation of that question and the non-answer of the author are the purpose and point of the novel.

A brilliant novel, one which I have read several times. Here we have a heterosexual author portraying vivid characters who are not heterosexual. This novel is always the one I hold up to emphasize that writers can write about any characters they want to write about, without any need to limit themselves to their own little demographic.

Also, one time I met Anthony Burgess on the street in Toronto and shook his hand.

Update May 2020. Just watched a documentary on Anthony Burgess in which they claimed Earthly Powers was his masterpiece. I have to agree!

I immensely enjoyed reading this book. It being the first book I've ever read by this intriguing author, I'm looking forward to read his other works. The incredibly rich 'autobiographical' story is cunningly interwoven with real events in the 1900 - 1970's. Most memorably, the author becomes the brother in law of 'Carlo', who was already sure in the 1920's to become pope, and eventually did so as John XXIII. After the first world war, the 'author' flees England to escape prosecution as a practicing homosexual and becomes successful while living in interesting places like Monaco, New York, Hollywood, Tangier, Barcelona (under Franco!) and Malta.

You learn a lot from reading this, at least I did. Mostly about church history, e.g. the arian heresy and much, much more. This is because the author was raised catholic and, while 'leaving' the church because of his homosexuality, never really gave up on it.

Also, his vocabulary is stunning, at least to me. I had to look up quite a few words, e.g. 'redolence', 'inchoate', 'strabismus venerean', and 'etoliated'. I suspect even native speakers might have trouble with some of those.

The only negative point is that towards the end, the story seems to stall a bit and previous patterns are repeated. So, in my opinion, the book could be a tiny bit shorter to make it perfect.