My second dive into Burgess after reading A Clockwork Orange years ago - and I think this is the better book. A long, bitingly satirical novel, the action follows the life of gay British novelist Kenneth Toomey and his on-again-off-again friendship with Carlo Campanati, who eventually rises to be Pope. Through the life of Toomey, Burgess tackles religious hypocrisy, religious power and comfort, Nazism, cults, the "colonial" experience, the birth of Hollywood and more. Toomey is a great narrator: a figure by turns pompous and obnoxious, then sympathetic and pitiful. The moral core of the novel is the problem of evil, free will and the soul; but this is all depicted in a book that sometimes feels picaresque and at others like Burgess is just making fun of various other writers. It's a long, complex book, but I had great fun with it.

"I was subjected to physical outrage which makes me doubt the capacity of literature to cope with human reality."

Second time around, still awesome! Love Burgess!

Earthly Powers is a very good book. It's a long book, densely packed, and one that shifts between different eras (in the c.20th), and multiple continents.
Earthly Powers is not a particularly famous or widely read work by any means, despite its Booker Prize shortlisting in 1980. The small number of Goodreads ratings is some evidence of that; A Clockwork Orange will always be the defining literary work associated with (prolific) Anthony Burgess.
Twenty years after Earthly Powers, William Boyd was Booker longlisted for Any Human Heart. There are obvious comparisons between the two books, and the two writers; Boyd is a much easier read, Burgess by far the cleverer.

Earthly Powers is a novel structured around good and evil, incorporating certain specific historical events to illustrate the underlying philosophical debate.
While Earthly Powers can be read as a novel with a strong overall theme, I found it mostly enjoyable as a series of only loosely connected stories within the whole:

Nazism
A subject as extensively discussed as any other in the last seventy years. Burgess, writing thirty five years after World War Two is masterful in his demolition of the spurious 'justification' of Nazi delusions of an Aryan Race.


(American) cults
The Jonestown massacre, the horrific mass suicide that happened at the back end of 1978, is undoubtedly the inspiration for the incorporation, fictionally, in Earthly Powers, of a Californian cult. Burgess also anticipates the slightly different horrors of Waco, thirteen years later, ironically the year he died.
Again, masterfully told.

The Catholic Church
Earthly Powers is an expression of Burgess's (lapsed) Catholic faith. Burgess questions the place of religious thought in a modern, secular world, by reference to original sin, free will, good and evil. I am no theologian, but Burgess writes most convincingly, and with respectful balance. Again, masterful.

Homosexuality
Homosexuality is, with Catholicism, a main and recurring theme. The homosexuality in Earthly Powers was a bit much for me. Not its ubiquitousness, not its moral justification, not the reality of homosexual preference, and love. The narrator's sister, Hortense, remarks, p311 "'why do you make everything sound so cold and horrid" That was my reaction at times. Earthly Powers addresses rape and paedophilia.The book was written in 1980, the year before Aids, but while attitudes towards casual sex, and responsible sex, changed after 1980, I still felt that Burgess addressed sex with too light a touch.
A number of reviewers have drawn attention to the opening lines of EP "I was in bed with my catemite". Unlike the rapes and under age sex, prostitution is sometimes consensual I guess.

Colonial Life; the ex-patriot
Earthly Powers features a snapshot of the Malay Peninsula (a part of the world written up by Burgess in his early work, and where he lived for a time).
This was my favourite section in Earthly Powers. There's humour and there's warm, male friendship, and love. p250 Mahalingham describes his religion not as ‘eclectic’, but ‘electric’ and then ‘eccentric’. When queried, he retorts:
”You don't have monopoly on language”!!!
The friendship between Kenneth Toomey and Dr Philip Shawcross is the only relationship devoid of suspicion, of a motive, of betrayal.

Author as actor in the fictional novel
Burgess plays around with the structure of EP throughout. He frequently addresses the reader directly, and introduces numerous famous literary figures as part of the dialogue. A typical example is Burgess's fictional alter ego talking with James Joyce, and taking this further, telling Joyce in a bar about a personal encounter(!) with a real Irish figure, George Russell, fictionalised by Joyce in Ulysses. Anthony Burgess is fearsomely erudite and the intertwining reality and fiction makes for a multi layered work of fiction. Thomas Pynchon and Burgess crossed paths, and it shows in some similarities of writing style.

Earthly Powers is a great book and Anthony Burgess is not a ‘one trick pony’ novelist that I fear may be the consequence of his renown as the author of A Clockwork Orange (to which he refers in Earthly Powers).

I can’t wait to read some more.

Burgess has a really neat way of connecting words and he certainly has got a style in writing. Yet this book expanded almost as the Universe during the Big Bang, which at times bored me (toward the end I skipped pages, I admit it). Maybe if I was in the Catholic faith, it would have affected me more, who knows. Yet one can see the vast imagination and life experience of the author. I really liked the main themes in the novel and Kenneth Toomey as well. This is also my first try with male homosexuality as a point of interest and I liked the interplay with Catholicism and state ostracism. Most of all I liked the inevitability of human loneliness, regardless of sex, age and class.

Sometimes I’m asked to list ‘the best gay novels ever’, and I often put this at Number One. Burgess isn’t thought of as a ‘gay writer’, although you don’t have to dig too far to figure out that he was at the very least bisexual. But Earthly Powers is nothing less than a 20th-century history viewed through the prism of homosexuality and homophobia, focusing on Catholicism, Nazism and just about every other ‘ism’ that matters. Like all Burgess it’s extremely funny and erudite, but for once he really seemed to be writing from the heart, rather than in response to an interesting literary idea. And how can you resist a book with the opening 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’? Burgess’s reputation seems to be in eclipse at the moment, which puzzles me because even his slighter novels have more to them than the works of Barnes, Rushdie, McEwan et al. At his best – and this is his very best – he’s the greatest of the post-War English novelists. Which must mean this is the greatest post-War English novel. There.

Basically a history of the 20th century (well, the immediate aftermath of the First World War up to the 1970s) told through the life of a mediocre ‘Lost Generation’ English novelist. It’s got changing attitudes (and the persona’s attempt to understand them), theologically inspired gay fiction, colonial fawning, an increasingly catholic Catholic Church, American cults, unreliable narration, the works! Very surprising that this hardly gets a mention when people discuss Burgess! If you like a sprawling work then I recommend!

The bygone world of the gay intellectual underground of the early 20th C that the book launches into seemed interesting ,and the morally compromised characters, especially in the priesthood, were funny and amusing. But then the book ploughs on in miniature scene after another like an unabridged diary. Not catching the many literary or cultural references, the book slipped away from me. Burgess is no doubt an excellent wordsmith and I needed a dictionary quite often and then there were neologisms of his own. It became too dense to hack my way through by 300 pages and frankly nothing really happened. The book lacks the pace of his shorter more famous works I think. Perhaps too the various sexual peccadillos referred to, often in some detail, just don't shock or titillate in a way they used to. We live in perhaps more sexually indifferent times, making the taboos addressed rather matter-of-fact, and everybody now knows the church can packed with hypocrisy and concupiscence.

Reading this book is like having an intelligent, overbearing person to a dinner party; one who insists on talking volubly on all topics, being a bit of a bore and wearing out the other guests. There was plenty of wit, plenty of clever little ideas - and quite a bit of grotesque violence, whether gay gang rape or brutal dismemberment by the mafia. At one point a Catholic priest sends a Malay man into convulsions after striking him in the head with a heavy crucifix.

It is undeniably colourful, and there are some wonderfully cheeky representations of famous authors like James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway who the protagonist, fictional author Kenneth Toomey, just happens to meet (he also meets many prominent Nazis). The language is rambunctious, the plots of the fiction Toomey writes comically absurd - and let's not forget that wonderful opening line.

But ultimately it is a hateful vision of life. Ostensibly religious conventions are set against homosexuality, but both lead onto suffering and disillusionment. It's a game with no winners.

The gay characters in particular all come across as these awful vainglorious pseudo-intellectuals that lisp through life. Perhaps Toomey just has bad taste in lovers, but it's a portrait of homosexuality that is repulsive and spiteful.

Certainly, it's purposefully subversive, whether jeering at religion, homosexuality or race - another theme depressingly presented. The trouble is it drags on brutally - like that bore of a dinner guest I mentioned earlier.

I'm sorry, I know this is a British classic. I know I'm probably breaking some holy writ about worshipping this book. But I don't, and all I can do is repeat: I'm sorry. Mea culpa.

Poderes terrenales es, tal vez, una de las novelas más ambiciosas de Burgess. Su premisa es bastante sencilla en la superficie: al escritor homosexual alejado de la iglesia Kenneth Toomey se le solicita que dé su testimonio para la canonización de un Papa muerto hace poco. Este Papa, Carlo Campanati, era amigo de Toomey, así como su cuñado, y fue testigo de un posible milagro de su parte. De ese modo, Toomey se larga a contar toda la historia de su vida por el turbulento siglo XX.
Con esa premisa, Burgess aprovecha de tratar muchos temas asociados al siglo, como la Primera Guerra Mundial, el fascismo, el post-colonialismo o las reformas de la Iglesia Católica. El tema que más aborda, eso sí, es el relacionado a la naturaleza del mal. Carlo es un convencido de que el hombre, al ser creado por Dios, es fundamentalmente bueno, y que cuando comete una maldad es sólo porque permitió que el diablo tomara decisiones y acciones por él. Esa mirada contrasta con la de Toomey, su hermana Hortense y muchos otros, que ven a lo largo de sus vidas las muchas iniquidades que el hombre puede cometer a otros motivado por odio, intolerancia o soberbia, y están convencidos que el hombre es malvado por naturaleza. Ellos ven a Carlo como ingenuo y poco conectado con el mundo real, demasiado sumergido en el empirismo y la filosofía de la iglesia como para prestar atención al mundo en el que vive. Carlo, por otro lado, ve esa actitud como un síntoma de los tiempos difíciles en los que se vive, y la necesidad imperante de mayor fe de parte de la gente. Con el correr de los acontecimientos, Toomey cae en peligro de ver a Dios como un ente malintencionado y cruel.
El otro tema de importancia es la memoria, y cómo ésta se reconstruye y tergiversa con el tiempo. Toomey reseña toda su vida en el libro de acuerdo a como la va recordando, algo que él mismo reconoce. Como tal, su narrativa no es del todo precisa con los hechos reales: fechas equivocadas, expresiones en lengua extranjera mal estructuradas, a veces sólo recuerda detalles generales y reconoce que los detalles específicos probablemente no eran así. Situaciones de este tipo se dan a lo largo de todo el libro, con mayor o menor grado de sutileza.
Toomey, como se mencionó antes, es homosexual. El cómo esto afecta a su vida es algo que aparece de forma recurrente, tanto en el hecho de que en su país es un acto ilegal, como la reacción de la gente ante su estilo de vida y la actitud de la iglesia ante ésta. Uno de los principales motivos por los que Toomey se alejó de la iglesia fue la incapacidad de congeniar su condición con la actitud de Roma hacia ello.
A pesar de que la historia abarca una época muy sacudida y en muchos momentos trágica, y que la vida de Toomey va tomando carices menos agraciados con el tiempo, la novela está rellena de detalles cómicos, sea en chistes de doble sentido, juegos de palabras, algunas irreverencias inesperadas (como la reescritura de la primera historia del Génesis para explicar cómo Dios creó a dos hombres como amantes y tras la tentación de la serpiente los castigó convirtiendo a uno de ellos en mujer) o las ocasionales hipocresías de Toomey. Uno de los detalles más absurdos, sin embargo, está en la misma premisa de la obra. A Toomey le piden del Vaticano que dé su explicación sobre un posible milagro, y Toomey se pone a escribir toda su vida. El milagro en cuestión lo cuenta a la mitad del libro, de forma muy somera y poco detallada, lo que pone en duda si acaso podría servirle de algo a la Santa Sede; uno casi puede imaginarse a ellos leyendo el libro y pensando: “Muchas gracias por su esfuerzo, señor Toomey, pero habríamos apreciado que se enfocara sólo en la parte del milagro. Y ojalá no se pegara tanto en todo el tema de su homosexualidad, nosotros no queremos leer sobre eso”. Sólo para aportar más a lo absurdo, los hechos prueban que el esfuerzo de Toomey podría habérselos ahorrado.

Shooting for the moon, knowing it would fall back to earth, this is Burgess at the height of his considerable powers, spinning a lopsided globe with one hand and, well, trying not to laugh too hard. The impossibly lofty account of civilization's status, set in an inauspicious moment, at the end of the twentieth century.

Haven't read since it was first published, but on the eve of a re-read -- an easy five stars.

Anthony Burgess's "Earthly Powers" is a compelling and ambitious novel that, in my opinion, deserves a full five-star rating. It's an intricate tapestry of 20th-century history, spun through the life of its protagonist, Kenneth Toomey, a semi-successful and semi-closeted gay British novelist.

The narrative structure of "Earthly Powers" is a work of art in itself. The novel takes the form of an extensive memoir, with Toomey reflecting on his eventful life that spans across seven decades. His journey intertwines with that of Carlo Campanati, a charismatic Italian priest who rises to become the Pope. Their interactions, discussions, and disagreements form the crux of the narrative, offering a riveting blend of personal and historical events.

Burgess's prose is vivid and engaging, filled with rich descriptions and sharp wit. His portrayal of Toomey, a flawed, cynical, yet inherently sympathetic character, is remarkably nuanced. Likewise, the depiction of Campanati, with his compassionate outlook and unwavering faith, provides an intriguing counterpoint to Toomey's scepticism.

"Earthly Powers" is as much a study of individual lives as it is a commentary on larger societal and philosophical themes. It delves into topics like religion, homosexuality, morality, and the purpose of art, presenting diverse viewpoints through its well-rounded characters. The novel doesn't shy away from controversial subjects, tackling them with a mix of empathy, scepticism, and subtle humour.

However, the true brilliance of "Earthly Powers" lies in its exploration of the tumultuous 20th century. The novel captures the zeitgeist of the era, weaving in major historical events and cultural shifts into the personal narratives of its characters. From World War I and II to the emergence of modernism in literature, the book offers a panoramic view of a century marked by upheaval and transformation.

In conclusion, "Earthly Powers" is a profound and provocative novel that combines personal narratives with grand historical events. It's a testament to Burgess's storytelling prowess and his keen insight into human nature and societal norms. It's a complex, challenging, yet deeply rewarding read, deserving of a five-star rating.