A monumental novel, recently back in print, that has stuck in my mind for thirty years as an all-time favorite but needed to be reread to remind me why. An octogenarian British writer, asked to attest to a miracle that will support canonization of a Pope, writes his memoirs, giving us a personal tour of the 20th-century through his life as a homosexual, lapsed Catholic, successful but mediocre writer, and exile. Examines morality, the nature of evil, the role of religious belief and more. Linguistically playful, the novel features one of the best opening lines in literature, and is funny, painful, thought-provoking, entertaining, challenging and rewarding. Thoroughly magnificent.

Outline of review:

Malta -- The book starts with the infamous opening sentence of being in bed with a catamite on the author's 81st birthday when Ali announced the arrival of the Archbishop of Malta. Quite the zinger, though later on the same page, this opening line is referenced as an "arresting opening" in a very postmodern analysis. Otherwise, Malta is suitably exotic, interesting and multi-cultural/referential, including mention of the arabic sounding Maltese language (which i had noticed when i eavesdroppped on some native Maltese chatting outside a corner store downstairs from our second floor, AirBnB Gallerja eight years ago). And I happened to be re-watching The Crown, which has a snippet of Elizabeth and Philip's time in Malta, pre-crown but post-wedding, reminding of the British inheritors of the previous French/Arabic/Italian/Greek conquerors/occupiers of the tiny island in the middle of the Mediterranean.

Los Angeles -- presented in the somewhat stereotypical/superficial "Hollywood" aspect of its many faces, though this presentation itself is superficial, perhaps intentionally demonstrating the nature of the city. Not too much about the urban/city condition of it, but the overall sense is of a highly commercial/business environment anathema to good work or art. There is also an LA adjacent cult/colony that reminds one of Jonestown or the Manson cult, a cautionary detour touching on the abandon and danger of reaching the westward limit to American/western expansion on the continent.

Malay --a significant segment of the story takes place in Malay(sia), where Kenneth Toomey spends a few years in another exotic outpost of British (waning) empire, complete with voodoo, iced afternoon gin, and a chaste, agape and intense relationship with another Brit expat. Visceral descriptions of tropical storms, including muddy roadways and transit havoc from interrupted service complement a more wallowing feeling of the entitled occupying a more "primitive" society, with the native inhabitants feeling mostly contempt but some deference to the alpha invaders.

London -- The London in the book is not drawn in great detail, but one gets some sense of its character in early/mid 20th century between the two world wars -- the clubs, the gossip and the pecking order/hierarchy among the intelligentsia.

Paris -- a nice counterpoint to London is the more cultured/bohemian Paris, where flaneurs and artists are more integrated into the social fabric, and lifestyle is more tinged with subterfuge and sexual dalliances.

Catholicism -- The narrator, like the author, comes from a working class, Roman Catholic background, and while this isn't a focus of the story, it does color the narrative, especially when the ecclesiastical aspect of the author's sister's husband's family comes into play. Especially the character who is loosely based on 20th Century Popes Paul, John and John Paul. And one of the interesting storytelling methods which i found striking was the insertion of highly esoteric and detailed theological analysis/ramblings, e.g. having to do with free will, original sin and the nature of evil, inserted into a text rife with frivolity, word play and verbal one upmanship. A beautiful (and effective) point/counterpoint which was one of the highlights of the book. Similarly, the confrontation of the Malysian witch doctor's curse with the Latin rite exorcist has one jumping between disblief, amusement and unlikely empathy.

Nazisim -- Moving and disturbing descriptions of Nazi atrocities, including Jew murdering, torture and bullying, made more poignant when juxtaposed with seemingly quotidian encounters with the Reich, such as an author's being feted at a Nazi Film Festival. And an interesting presentation of German/English interaction by relating a German speaker's English, using English words but German syntax. Very funny.

British Literary Establishment -- Lots of literary name dropping, including "Jim" Joyce, Willy S. Maugham and related artists and musicians, making for interesting fleshing out of the decades marching through the story.

Classism -- Related to the above Catholicism category, in that the Roman Catholics (as distinct from Anglican Catholic, but this is another story) in the story, including the author, are by nature lower in the hierarchy. Though interestingly, they seem to be as erudite, cultured and intellectual as their Protestant counterparts. But the Classism is present, especially with regard to those in the far reaches of empire, and in the lingering slavery/serfism of the servants.

Postmodernism -- Interesting, postmodern(ish) self consciousness throughout, bearing out the admonitions early on that the author is not to be trusted, either in his memory or in the telling of the tale, as writers are by nature liars (and if not liars, then at least at odds with reality, though again, another topic.) And given the early 1980's date of publication, a timely aspect, in that postmodernism was at or near to its height.

Homosexuality -- Interestingly, the narrator is homosexual, even though Burgess himself was seemingly not (though said to be modeled on W. Somerset Maugham). So the portryal of the homosexual goes through the narrator's entire life, from young man to old, with seeming accuracy and astuteness. The previously mentioned chaste relationship in Kuala Lumpur was interesting in that it was seemingly the most heartfelt of several, which included transactional/commercial ones in old age, and schoolboy frippery and casualness as a youth.

Aside from these particular topics, the book overall is a nice balance between a 20th century "epic" novel by a self-effacing "important" author, and a more modest travelogue (with philosphical/theological musings), tied together by an unlikely family network. The pace is alternately relaxed and quick, the narration erudite, sometimes maddeningly so (have your dictionary handy!), the history interesting though sometimes doubtful. My only other encounter with Anthony Burgess was via the film Clockwork Orange, so was expecting something more dense and experimental. There was one episode in which the narrator is beaten up, violently, which did remind me of the "ultra violence" of Clockwork, but that may have been playing on expectations. For me, it was a nice summer read, including in the garden and at woodlands getaways, but i could see it fitting well in the cold winter night mold. Recommend!

Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1980, when Rites of Passage http://realini.blogspot.com/2021/03/r... won the award
8 out of 10


Earthly Powers is included on the list of 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read https://poemeglume.blogspot.com/2023/... and furthermore, ‘it was named joint third for the best work of British and Commonwealth fiction of the last 25 years (along with Ian McEwan's Atonement, Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children)’ but alas, it has done so well with yours truly

However, all aspects had been in favor of this remarkable, only so damn long novel - 678 pages is too much to ask for such a feeble reader, and we could add, especially in this day and age when we are always in a rush…to quote DeGeneres, even when they go to the yoga session, people shout that they are in a hurry
On the other hand, if we talk Marcel Proust, the most accomplished writer for this reader, then the size of the chef d’oeuvre does not matter, on the contrary, the longer the better, because then you could enjoy the radiance, magic, spectacular voyage that the author has prepared for you http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/10/a... for longer and you delay the end of the encounter.

Just like with Marcel Proust, this is what happened to me with A Dance To The Music of Time http://realini.blogspot.com/2016/07/h... the sublime, divine magnum opus written by the Godhead Anthony Powell, where I remember inserting longer periods of time between the (twelve, but they could have been three hundred, the catharsis would have been prolonged) volumes
As it is, Anthony Burgess has delighted the readers with his own masterpiece, A Clockwork Orange http://realini.blogspot.com/2014/06/a... which is not just fantastic, stupendous, but brings to life a whole new language…well, not really a new one, but at the very least some outstanding, funny new words like Millicent, brought from Russian and used to exalt the reading public.

Thus, there had been plenty of arguments in favor of Earthly Powers (mind you, there still are, it is just that yours truly does not play the game too well, or not anymore, and if the prospect is of going through more than six hundred pages, then I need to be god damn pampered, amused, nay, laughter must be Homeric in size and there is a lot more that is needed) and another one was…Somerset Maugham.

This is another glorious author and one of my top five, the short stories are nec plus ultra http://realini.blogspot.com/2014/04/m... -the main character, who is also the narrator is himself a writer, and presumably based on William Somerset Maugham
It begins with the "outrageously provocative" first sentence: "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"

Kenneth Marchal Toomey is clearly gay, and because he lives in an age when this is illegal, and society looks down, or worse upon those who ‘live in this terrible sin’, just like Maugham, the personage will face numerous challenges – and I have only reached to 44% on a kindle, and then abandoned the project
His mother is appalled when she finds out, and wants him to keep the truth from his father, sister and brother, only the siblings find out, the sister, Hortense, would even use this knowledge in the disputes they have, seeing that Toomey wants her to more or less obey his instructions, she says ‘what about you’ or words to that effect

Hortense comes to stay with her brother, after their mother dies and she meets Domenico, a composer, and the latter’s brother, a flamboyant, exotic priest who gambles, but Kenneth Toomey is off on an adventure with a homosexual friend in Marseille, and unable to return home in time to save the ‘honor’ or something
Hence, when he returns, he finds his sister with the composer in bed, where they have clearly had sex, which leads to a confrontation, reproaching, and eventually (spoiler alert if needed, albeit this probably happens in the first quarter or so) they would marry, because Hortense says so, and even have twins…

I may be mistaken, but I think I remember reading in the fabulous, exhilarating and hilarious Belles Lettres Papers http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/05/t... by extraordinary Charles Simmons that Anthony Burgess was too lenient, kind with bad works of literature
Indeed, I actually recommend reading the magical Belles Lettres Papers rather than Earthly Powers, but hey, this is just me, and I am probably off with this one (if not more), I mean not that The Belles Lettres is not good, it is radiant, but the skepticism for the Anthony Burgess looong novel is just a weakness, mea culpa...

Now for a question, and invitation – maybe you have a good idea on how we could make more than a million dollars with this http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/u... – as it is, this is a unique technique, which we could promote, sell, open the Oscars show with or something and then make lots of money together, if you have the how, I have the product, I just do not know how to get the befits from it, other than the exercise per se

As for my role in the Revolution that killed Ceausescu, a smaller Mao, there it is http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/r...

From To The Heritage:
‘Fiction is infinitely preferable to real life...As long as you avoid the books of Kafka or Beckett, the everlasting plot of fiction has fewer futile experiences than the careless plot of reality...Fiction's people are fuller, deeper, cleverer, more moving than those in real life…Its actions are more intricate, illuminating, noble, profound…There are many more dramas, climaxes, romantic fulfillment, twists, turns, gratified resolutions…Unlike reality, all of this you can experience without leaving the house or even getting out of bed…What's more, books are a form of intelligent human greatness, as stories are a higher order of sense…As random life is to destiny, so stories are to great authors, who provided us with some of the highest pleasures and the most wonderful mystifications we can find…Few stories are greater than Anna Karenina, that wise epic by an often foolish author…’
‚parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus’
“the Meaning of Life...Well, it's nothing very special. Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.”

I rarely write reviews but I feel that this book warrants breaking habit. For a book that runs 650 pages, not once did Earthly Powers become a chore. The most incredible thing about this book isn't that it flows for 650 pages with no stutter, it's not the perfectly-timed, respectfully delivered sucker punches, it's not the fact that the man has delivered a history of the 20th Century (on both a personal and wider scale).

The most impressive, incredible thing for me about this book is that no matter how deeply you dive into the myriad puns, flourishes, cultural references, historical passages or deliberate contradictions, the book never loses one iota of what you could, I suppose, call "readability".

There's not a point in among the bilingual jokes, the (obviously deliberate) verbose nervousness with which the narrative voice begins his relationship with the reader or the peppering of text with classic references at which I felt Burgess had written this for the Oxbridge pals club and to hell with the rest. I won't even touch on how infallible his character construction is or how perfectly formed each chapter is or how the text flows like liquid, more so than any other modern classic writer I've read. It's worth every minute of the time you will spend on it.

“Poderes Terrenales” (o “Earthly Powers”) es mi primera novela de Anthony Burgess (autor de la famosa «A Clockwork Orange» adaptada por Stanley Kubrick). Una decisión tomada debido a una precipitada lectura de la sinopsis: una exploración entre dos personajes opuestos y principales: Kenneth Toomey, un escritor de literatura comercial de éxito (pero vacía), y Carlo Campannati (futuro Papa Gregorio XVII)”.

Sin embargo, las razones que me empujaron a seguir leyéndola pese a no ser religioso ni tampoco habitual a la «literatura sin género», fueron otras: estilo, movimiento, humanidad en los personajes y los temas fascinantes que impregnan sus casi novecientas páginas. En breves profundizaré cada una de ellas.

"—

Who knew that the author of A Clockwork Orange wrote an epic saga about eighty years in the life of a gay writer? Well, okay, maybe a lot of people, but I certainly didn't. I think A Clockwork Orange is a genius work of writing, but Earthly Powers manages to be even better (in certain respects). The writing style of Earthly Powers feels nothing like that of A Clockwork Orange, which makes it even more of a feat to me. It spans most of the 20th century and incorporates real and fictional characters. The story follows Kenneth Toomey, world famous author, and his extended family and manages to bookend his entire life story with a miraculous mystery. Despite the fact that it was almost 700 pages, it was incredibly hard to put down. Each new year in his life offered a new story, but the whole thing manages to remain tied together, every chapter influencing the next. Toomey's life was incredibly tragic, while also full of unbelievable experiences. His social circles include movie stars, great authors, hustlers, nazis and even a pope. Full of intrigue, but still able to feel so real, this is Anthony Burgess's true masterpiece.

"Sin? Such nonsense."

Earthly Powers is a magnificent book, one of the best books I have ever read, no exaggeration. It's difficult to categorize since so many adjectives apply to it: historical, sexual, political, religious, artistic, comedic, playful, supremely literary. Most of all, it's relentlessly, uncompromisingly, unashamedly, intellectual. Thus, unfortunately it's little read today, it if ever was, and serves as no modern model—hardly a negative attribute. I don't feel such a book as Earthly Powers needs a review—it stands apart, monumentally. Besides, I am incapable of doing it justice, so I won't try.

As Paul Theroux writes in the book's Introduction, "It is such a pleasure to see such a grand edifice of intelligence, humor, ambition, and imagination, that it is impossible on reviewing it to appear less than rapturous."

Here is Burgess' purpose for the book, as stated within by his main character, the author Ken Toomey: "I can't accept that a work of fiction should be either immoral or moral. It should merely show the world as it is and have no moral bias. It is for the reader to see in the book the nature of the motives of human actions and perhaps learn something, too, of the motives behind the social forces which judge those actions and which, I take it, we call a system of morality." (181)

Think about that for a moment. Does it not most precisely defiine the author-reader contract? Do you hear the intellectual challenge Burgess offers to his readers? Can you just about imagine the beautiful free-thinking which Burgess displays unapologetically throughout the book?

Well...enough! I won't write some trite, embarrassing, gushing review.

But I will share some characteristic quotes from the book! (There are many. This list is really a reference for me years from now, so scroll down if you are uninterested.)

"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." (11) [Here is one of the best opening lines in all of literature. In addition to being "arresting," it emcompassses the entire scope of the book in one sentence. This should be studied in lit classes, if there are any actually being taught.]

"God blast and bloody well damn this bloody stinking place." (14)

"The world was once all miracle. Then everything started to be explained. Everything will be explained in time. It's just a matter of waiting." (21)

"As for the Nobel, I did not write inelegantly or tendentiously enough." (25)

"I liked Jim Joyce but not his demented experiments with language. He threw away the chance of becoming a great novelist in the great tradition of Stendhal. He was always trying to make literature a substitute for religion." (74)

"My capacity for love was hedged in by all the thundering edicts of Moses." (77)

"Sin? Such nonsense." (86)

"I expected a little gift, you know, something nice and useless, you know, from Cartier's." (144)

"States and Churches alike must forbid pleasure. Pleasure renders the partaker indifferent to the power of both." (188)

[!!!] "And the boy he took his lover like a beast, thrusting his empurpled royal greatness into the antrum, without tenderness, with no cooings of love, rather with grunts and howls, his unpaired nails drawing blood from breast and belly, and the sky opened for both of them, disclosing in blinding radiance the lineaments of a benedicent numen." [!!!] (191)

"Joe Conrad's sea smells of Roget's thesaurus, as I was always telling him, but he wouldn't listen." (192)

"Stertile thunder tonitruated terribly. 'Oh Lord forgive us our bloody sins.' Rain now pelted. It was hard work finding a taxi." (199) [Joycean? Nabokovian? Yes.]

"Everyone has a right to be born. No one has a right to live." (226) [Oh I heartily disagree with this, but the fictional future Pope said it. It's a concise distillation of, shall we say, a serious problem with a certain religion.]

"Once the Christians fought the Moslems, and then the Christians fought each other. Faith is hard to sustain unless it is either beleaguered or dreams the imperial dream." (231)

"This postwar world's learning to separate the act of sex from the act of generation. The Church says that's a sin. But it's deliberately chosen, a healthy act of free will. If it's a sin then I'm predisposed to sin. The Church and I can't agree on it. So I'm out of the Church. Very simple and very unfair." (306)

"Religion is the most dangerous thing in the world. It is not little girls in their communion frocks and silly holy pictures and the Children of Mary. It is highly explosive, dynamite, the splitting of the atom." (349)

"These are bad bad times. This is the worst century that history has ever known. And we're only a third of the way through it. There have to be martyrs and witnesses." (381)

"And what were you doing in Paris?" "Seeing James Joyce. The Irish writer. A confirmed neutral in the last war, despite his British passport. Trained by Jesuits. Author of Ulysses, long banned for dirtiness. He'd promised me a copy of Finnegans Wake. Signed. A great experimental masterpiece. Confiscated by HM Customs for investigation. I assured them it was not in code. Damn it all, the publishers are Faber and Faber." (435)

"Black is no colour, merely a brutal politicoracist abstraction, and it was the texture of her skin that struck before it's indefinable hue, or rather was inseparable from it, the pleasure of the sight of it only, one knew, to be completed by the most delicate palpation: as if honey and satin were one substance and both alive and yet sculpted of richest gold." (474)

"Meanwhile in France a new breed of writers was producing the nouveau roman, based on the rejection of plot and character and, indeed, everything I have always stood for. It was perhaps with unspoken relief that, admiring these, professors of fiction took my own works to bed and, enjoying them, had to rationalize their enjoyment in terms of my consciously, in a kind of revolt against postmodernism, ridiculous term, reverting to an earlier tradition. I was not, of course, reverting at all." (523)

"Homosexuals may be in the minority, your honor, though I submit that there is less thoroughgoing heterosexuality in the community than orthodoxy would have us believe. Nevertheless, homosexuals have a right to an expression of their own view of life and love. Our literature has been grievously harmed by the suppression of that right. So, God help us, has society in general. No man or woman can help being homosexual. I cannot help it myself." (530)

"What the hell do you mean, real father? There are no real fathers, only legal ones. Mothers are different, mothers are all too real." (587)

"History has been unfair to Socrates. Just as it's probably been unfair to Christ. History is too often written by heterosexuals." (598)

If these quotes aren't enough, as evidence, perhaps, of the literary heft of Earthly Powers, I created an index to the many authors mentioned in the book. Burgess uses them both as elements of plot and to bring twentieth-century ideas into the novel as it evolves historically. A few of these are actual characters—James Joyce, for example, with whom Toomey has several fascinating and funny conversations full of word-play.

I did this as an amusement while reading, never myself too bothered by justifiable, substantive name-dropping. The page numbers are first instances only (several appear repeatedly) and are in textual sequence. There are also many invented authors who serve Burgess' critical needs. These are not listed here, unless I failed with the reality check.

Henry James (12), Rainer Maria Rilke (13), Norman Douglas (19), Thomas Campion (20), Thomas More (20), Aldous Huxley (21), Walt Whitman (22), W. Somerset Maugham (25), Hermann Hesse (37), Ernest Hemingway (49), Samuel Butler (50), James Joyce (50), Rupert Brooke (59), F. Scott Fitzgerald (63), Omar Khayyam (63), Edward Thomas (64), Ezra Pound (68), George Bernard Shaw (69), Joris-Karl Huysmans (69), Oscar Wilde (69), W. W. Jacobs (76), P. G. Wodehouse (76), Gustave Flaubert (76), Honoré de Balzac (76), Victor Hugo (76), Compton Mckenzie (78), Hugh Walpole (78), D. H. Lawrence (78), Graham Greene (79), H. G. Wells (79), Eden Philpotts (80), Arnold Bennett (80), Max Beerbohm (81), Moliére (87), E. M. Forster (104), Edmond Rostand (117), William Shakespeare (117), Blaise Pascal (123), W. H. Auden (126), Christopher Isherwood (126), Robert Browning (126), Havelock Ellis (160), T. S. Eliot (161), Sigmund Freud (161), Radcliffe Hall (163), Ford Madox Ford (165), Joseph Conrad (192), Ezra Pound (192), Sylvia Beach (192), Adrienne Monnier (192), Hall Caine (193), Valery Larbaud (194), Wyndham Lewis (198), Oswald Mosley (209), Rudyard Kipling (209), John Milton (214), Marcel Proust (216), André Gide (223), George Eliot (257), Edgar Wallace (268), François Rabelais (289), Gertrude Stein (310), Edward Spenser (322), E. E. Cummings (339), Geoffrey of Monmouth (345), Stefan Zweig (420), John Middleton Murry (423), Kate Mansfield (423), George Orwell (424), Marie Corelli (523), William Thackeray (529), Charles Dickens (529), Henry Miller (529), John Donne (529), Richard Crashaw (529), Jeremy Taylor (529), Christopher Marlowe (530), Anatole France (535), Nevil Shute (572), J. D. Salinger (573), Virgil (573), James Baldwin (576), Ralph Ellison (576), Isaac Bashevis Singer (582), Gerard Manley Hopkins (602), Frederick "Fr" Rolfe (622)

It begins on his eighty first birthday with the narrator, Kenneth Toomey announcing that he was

“in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me."

It's an opening that is a significant introduction to the core of the book, but we soon find out that for Toomey the real question is can one clearly distinguish between the fact and the created fiction of one’s life, and with that we are transported back to his early life and led on a journey that takes us up to and beyond the present day opening of the novel. 82 chapters covering 82 (?) years seems logical, but of course, Burgess is playing with us as he is constantly doing throughout the novel. I saw Burgess speaking on TV on a couple of occasions in my late teens and early twenties and totally disliked him and his staunch conservatism and that is probably why it has taken me decades to get around to reading this. I was secretly hoping to hate it from the get go and triumphantly abandon it midway, but it turned out to be engrossing. Yes, it is much too long, yes, I would need a second or a third reading to really get to grips with it, and yes it does have weaknesses. but it actually might be the masterpiece that many have claimed it to be.

Heel leesbaar boek, dankzij de Britse humor en de woordspelingen van de tamelijk onsympathieke hoofdpersoon. Dat Kenneth Toomey een onsympathieke man is, draagt overigens bij aan het leesplezier. Zijn droogheid en opgekropte emoties zijn zeer humoristisch.

Maar toch. Ik heb moeite met zijn antisemitische, racistische en sexistische beschrijvingen van mensen. Het is als het meeluisteren met de gedachten van een oude, foute oom, die zelf nota bene homoseksueel is maar neigt naar homofobe beschrijvingen van andere homo's. Het woord pederast komt meerdere keren langs. Dit is een zeer onterechte benaming voor homo's, die in conservatieve samenlevingen zoals op de Balkan nog steeds wordt gebruikt om mannen die zich aangetrokken voelen tot mannen te diskwalificeren en fysiek aan te vallen.

Kortom: ik heb Earthly powers gelezen met dubbele gevoelens. Van mij krijgt het boek 2,5 sterren.

Eighty-one-year-old author, Kenneth Toomey, is called upon by the Catholic Church to assist in the canonization of his brother-in-law, Carlo Campanati, the late Pope Gregory XVII. The “event” he is obliged to chronicle occurred in a Chicago hospital in the 1930s, when, unable to save his own brother from horrendous wounds inflicted by gangsters, Campanati appears to help alleviate a child’s cancer. In the course of describing his life, Toomey recounts major events of the 20th century (particularly the world wars), as he (and his brother-in-law) are by their eminence and fame able to finagle front-row seats.

The central irony in this detailed and sweeping novel is Toomey’s discovery that the miracle gives means for the boy to grow to become a religious cult leader who directs his thousands of worshippers to kill themselves. As portrait and commentary on/of 20th-century history and culture, Earthly Powers succeeds on a grand scale, and Burgess spins an erudite, complex, and entertaining tale of intertwined impulses/lives, spiritual and secular, that wrap the Janus century in twin vestments of good and evil.

I'm unsure if I'll remember this as fondly in a few years as I do now. The second quarter of the book was extremely dull, and the narrative 'technique' is silly (bad novelist travels to a dozen or so countries in order to pick up royalties cheques through the twentieth century--necessary because there were such restrictions on currency movement). These two problems almost, almost destroy the book's excellent qualities. But then it more or less comes together.

The narrator's friend, Carlo Campanati, is the intellectual center of the novel. He will be elected after Pius XII, as Pope Gregory, in place of the real world's John XXIII and Paul VI. He is, more or less, semi-Pelagian, obsessed with ecumenism, and insists on dragging the church into modernity; he's also charmingly human, stands against fascism and is an orphan. In the middle of the book, he asks the narrator to publish a book of ecumenism and semi-Pelagian theology under the narrator's name, and 'Earthly Powers' then becomes an extended meditation on freedom, predestination, grace and how much or how little human beings can contribute to their own salvation.

All of which is enough for me, but those of you who don't revel in obscure theological controversies (or even fairly well known ones) might prefer to think about this through the narrator, Kenneth Toomey, and his sexuality: he insists that he didn't 'choose' to be gay. If he didn't choose his sexuality, however, that's ipso facto evidence against the freedom that his friend the Pope insists (against the traditional doctrines of the church) we possess. Toomey wanders through the twentieth century, generally doing things despite himself. So whereas Carlo/Gregory shows what's possible for a human being who (acts as if he) was entirely free, Toomey shows how life can equally well be understood as nothing more than one contingent event after another (e.g., he 'accidentally' saves Goebbels' life). At the center of all this is a miracle performed by Carlo/Gregory, and the question arises there, too: how much credit does he deserve?

In addition to all this kind of thing Burgess piles on the laughs with groan-worthy puns, literary in-jokes (Toomey meets many of modernism's most important figures, despite being decidedly unmodernist), and occasional thoughts on the unreliability of memory and therefore of first person narrations... like that of Earthly Powers, which of course twists history in important ways to show something like the truth of the twentieth century.

Burgess's prose is clever, sometimes excessively so, and sometimes pointlessly. But I'd far rather read that than yet more sub-Hemingwayan blandishments for the undemanding reader.

For some reason, this stays with me: "He had a compassionate face: he would be compassionate while supervising human liquidation: this liquidates me more than it does you."

Oef, zucht van opluchting. Wat een monsterlijk boek was dit. Pronkerig en potsierlijk, hemels flikkerend soms, maar ook ennui tot de dood in lange passages met een overdaad aan verwijzingen.

De verteller is onbetrouwbaar in het kwadraat, zo zegt hij zelf, want hij is oud en hij is schrijver. Ons geheugen veinst slechts betrouwbaarheid en schrijvers gaan altijd voor het verhaal. Daarbovenop komt de dubbele laag die ontstaat uit het spanningsveld tussen schrijver en verteller.

“The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed catholic, short-sighted, colour-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read. He should also be about my age,” beweerde Anthony Burgess ooit (The Paris Review, no.56, spring 1973). Dat ben ik dus niet. Komt het daardoor dat ik de juichrecensies bij deze uitgave niet helemaal volg?

Waar komt het Kwaad vandaan? Kan je als lustige homo volwaardig katholiek blijven? In theologische beschouwingen wordt gemijmerd over de aard van het kwaad en daar komt de Duivel zelf om de hoek piepen. Voor mij is dat een een beetje een ver-van-mijn-bedshow. Hoe scherp sommige hoofdstukken ook geschreven zijn: ik blijf met gemengde gevoelens achter.

Anthony Burgess, die ook een inleiding tot de Engelse literatuur schreef, goochelt met de literaire referenties. Leuk voor de ingewijden, sneu als je minder vertrouwd bent Henry James of Jim Joyce. Bovendien worden er zo veel auteurs vermeld dat het vooral interessant wordt om op zoek te gaan naar wie niet vermeld wordt en waarom. Legt de schitterende afwezigheid van Graham Greene een persoonlijke wrevel tussen beide auteurs weer?

De centrale gedachte is boeiend. Goede acties kunnen slechte gevolgen hebben (en omgekeerd), dus hoe kan je in godsnaam bepalen wat goed of slecht is? Maar de uitwerking kon me niet altijd boeien. Voeg daarbij dan nog een protserige voorliefde voor moeilijke adjectieven als zenig, stagiritisch, omnifutuent, proleptisch, autocefaal, manicheïstisch of heliotroop en het wordt allemaal wat veel voor Corneel.