“What, Mr. Toomey, do you seek out of life?” A very straight question. “To enjoy it. To fix the phenomena of human society in words.” This is the central theme of this novel which doggedly try to fix the mystery of living within the riot of bodies and souls, art and religion, the historical and the individual. Above all, it is about the good and evil played within the many interlocking spheres lives. Don’t expect clean, neat conclusions. The cycle goes on, but each turning of the clog is cogent. “What is the point of the dialectic of fiction or drama unless the evil is as cogent as the good?”, Toomey said once. Exactly, the force of evil should not come as a caricature of red-tights and horns; it comes to good deeds, good intentions, and the accidental intermingling of lives. Evil should be just as cogent as the water and air we take in to sustain mortal life, and quite unaware of it till we face it in certain moments. We are born weak, and our judgment is forever in doubt and error. But we try to be good and do justice to our gifts anyway.

One of main theme is about the difficult task of Love, Love of other people, and Love of God. One does not replace the other, yet these two loves are the twin engines driving the two protagonists — Kenneth Toomey and Carlo Campanini — through out their long lives. It is not “War and Peace”, but it tries and succeeded significantly in creating a new character, a fully-bodied representative of God, Carlo Campanati, relative by marriage to our writer Toomey. Now we hear mostly from Toomey’s narrative which he called as confabulation instead memory, a Forest Gump kind of romp through historical events, however much darker.

Let me admit first what does not interest me — the milieu of artists and writers post WWI, the 20’ to 30’s Hollywood film productions, the pulp fiction creation industry, the British colonial culture in Asia, and Toomey’s tedious pursue of younger partners. However if another reader does not care about Christian theology, then he/she would find much of this book either tedious or irrelevant. For me, the glory of this story is about two men, one apostatized by his own homosexuality, another truly apostolic both in rank and in spirit, confronting the question of Good and Evil in their own lives. Questions of Sin, Free Will and Catholic Orthodoxy morality play the major themes in these two very different men, who traversed their individual lives in different paths yet intertwined due to marriage, friendship and brotherhood.

The cycles of generations and lives have a dark hue of nihilism, considering how each generation turned out so differently, and the good ones died so abruptly and senselessly in wars, random crime, religious tragedy, and ravaging diseases. There is no happy ending, but satisfying endings, both the members of Toomey’s and Campanati’s find their individual endings as fractals from this irreducibly complex human whirlpool of living in time and space.

*** Notes

Ch 27, Carlo’s sermon on the problem of Evil, Freewill, and the Just War.

“I ask you to distinguish very carefully between that word sin and that other word evil. For sin is a thing that human souls can commit, but evil is the already existent entity that, through the act that we term a sin, a human soul may voluntarily embrace.”

We have inherited this capacity for sin from them as we have inherited the other features of the Adamic, or human, identity. Now sin we may define as a transgression made possible by our ingrained capacity for confusing the truly or divinely good with what the fallen Son of the Morning represents as a higher good.”

“That is nonsense,” Carlo said, taking another orange. “You cannot make moral judgments on things, only on actions.”

Carlo on the straying Toomey:

“that we will have you back only when you are ready to engage life. Even in sin to engage it. ”

Carlo on human love “… the spiritus of the theologians, the entity you could define only negatively and yet love positively, more, love ardently, with and to the final fire. So, however reluctantly, a man may be brought back to God.”

“There was a better and simpler reality in the mere act of sitting here, cool under the ceiling fan in a bare swept room, the windows open to sun and green and birds without song, knowing that Philip would be home soon for tiffin and that home was the finest word in the world, no trap or confidence trick, the ultimate unanalysable, basic as the scent of an English flower.”

Of Soul:

“What do you mean by a soul?” a sporty-looking man with a postiche asked. “What’s left of the whole human complex when the body is taken away. The part of the human totality concerned not with the business of living in the world but with values— those essences which we call truth, beauty and goodness.”

Of Free Will ( liberum arbitrium):
Man was defined by his capacity for moral choice, and the existence of evil in opposition to good was a guarantee of that capacity for free election.

Of War and Suffering in history:

But may we speak of waste, when so many men, and women too, were driven to acts of heroism, love and self-sacrifice that could never have been persuaded to emerge out of an era of peace and torpor?

The Church teaches the slow working of God’s grace like yeast in the heavy dough of a human history that has been mostly hard to swallow.

Of Original Sin:
Original sin was original weakness, not being sufficiently clever, or Godlike, to spot the machinations of the fiend.

Of Hell:
“A soul at last aware that truth and beauty and goodness, as expressed in what we may call the personality of God, go on existing but quite beyond the hope of that soul’s being able to get at them. The condemned soul knows what it wants, but it can’t have what it wants. That’s hell.”


## Useful words

1. Velleity: A wish not strong enough to lead to action
2. Traduce: Speak badly of or tell lies about so as to damage reputation
3. commination: the action of threatening divine vengeance
4. factitious: artificially created or developed
5. shibboleth: a custom, principle, or belief distinguishing a particular class or group of people, often outmoded or no longer important
6. apotropaic: averting evil or bad luck
7. philoprogenitive: having many offspring, or showing love to one’s offspring
8. Arian heresy: Arianism, supremely of God the father instead of the Trinity, theology related to Unitarianism and Jehovah’s Witness.
9. Pelagian heresy: denied the church’s doctrine of original sin and the necessity of infant Baptism. Pelagianism was opposed by Augustine, bishop of Hippo, who asserted that human beings could not attain righteousness by their own efforts and were totally dependent upon the grace of God.
10: apothegem, aphorism, epigram: all related to witty, pithy, intelligent saying
11. sybaritic, sybarite: a person who is self-indulgent in their fondness for sensuous luxury.

A bit like climbing Everest.

Exhilarating particularly on the way down.

It's long, let's face it ...long. Funny and obsessed with homosexuality, but hey that's one of its strengths.

This is a hell of a book.

It took me about two and a half months to read, even though it's not one of the longest books I've read. That's cause this sucker is DENSE - no book for someone looking for an easy read.

The narrator, Kenneth Toomey, is a British novelist, now in his eighties, looking back over his life. Despite the fact that he is openly homosexual, officials from the Catholic Church want him to write for them - an account about the recently deceased pope, Gregory XVII, or Carlo Campanati. The two men have lived fairly entwined lives - Ken's sister marries Carlo's brother, and they become a sort of family.

Both Toomey and Campanati are brilliantly realized characters. The arch, snooty voice of Toomey sells the whole book, as he relates the stories of his fame and notoriety. But Carlo is a mystery of sorts, a solid man who believes that evil is an outside force, that man is basically good. But does Toomey share that view? Not quite...

I was hoping this wasn't one of those "here's how my characters live through the various incidents of a historical period" novels, and it wasn't. Though Toomey and Campanati encounter Italian fascists, Nazi propogandists, and groovy Californian cult leaders, the characters never take a back seat to events - the events inform us more about the characters. I really appreciated that.

All I've known of Burgess is his (admittedly impressive) Clockwork Orange, but after Earthly Powers my interest is piqued. Definitely one of the most unique and memorable books I've read this year.

This is a big sprawling book that presents the entire long lifetime of the protaganist against a panoramic background of the twentieth century. The sprawl of the book is consistent with the personality of its hero, Kenneth Toomey, a good but cynical man who wanders geographically, morally and artistically. Burgess deals with issues of good and evil, religion, sexuality, family, art, memory -- the list goes on. It is certainly epic in scope and very close to being epic in its achievement. But the danger of the sprawl and the massive scope of the book is that sometimes is sprawls a bit too much and sometimes its reach exceeds its grasp. Of course this is consistent with the personality of Toomey, but it isn't quite great art to illustre the personality defects of the hero by intentionally writing a slightly defective book. It would perhaps have been better to have been a bit more indirect in making this particular point.

The thing that I loved the most about this book was the interplay between historical fact, fiction, and memory. The actual historical events of the era are essential to setting the stage, as are the actual historical persons who are scattered through the book, but the facts are blurred by the inevitable inaccuracies of an old man's memory and intentional manipulation by the narrator for personal and artistic purposes. He tells us repeatedly that he is doing this but leaves it to the reader to figure out who, what, how, where and why. It all mixes together in a delicious stew of truth and untruth that is perhaps more true in the end than the unvarnished truth would have been.

Holy fucking shit Earthly Powers was long. 646 pages of Kenneth Toomey's bitchy perspective - witness to the world but observer only of himself - and man, "himself" is narrow. I picked EP up on Martin Amis's enthusiastic recommendation and I cannot say that he was wrong but fuck if Toomey isn't the most boring, blandly unlikable main character I've encountered in a long work. Hortense, Dominico, and especially Carlo are all interesting but we get the most of Ken, and (cut my eyes out every time he's on the page) Val. Burgess's skill is second to few in EP but that's absolutely all that kept me going. Ultimately, EP was the story of a long life lived told by a master craftsman of a writer but it was a slog. All the skill somehow seemed to keep leading nowhere - like attending the Olympics but only being able to watch the practice routines. The reader never saw all that skill be put to the use it was intended
I'm glad I read it and I recommend it but it's low on my list of longys that you need to read

One of my top five my favourite books, Earthly Powers is, above all, a compelling bit of storytelling. A sprawling, multi-generational tale that follows the protagonist's life from teenager to octogenarian and includes a number of real people such as Churchill and James Joyce. It is essentially the 20th Century distilled through the eyes of its' protagonist—who is cynical, but a humanist at heart. It's the fictional autobiography of a gay, expatriate English novelist now living in Malta. It opens with the writer being visited by an arch-bishop who asks him to be a witness in the canonization process of a dead Pope, who was a long-time friend of the writer. Most of the book is a series of flashbacks consisting of the bulk of the writer's life. Using this architecture, Burgess comments on the nature of art: "All fiction is autobiographical and all autobiography is fiction". Utterly captivating: funny, moving and an intellectual feast.

“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.”
That’s a first sentence of such brilliance and Burgess knows it. For in the voice of his narrator, the novelist Kenneth Toomey, he comments that the reader will observe he has “lost none of my old cunning in the contrivance of what is known as an arresting opening.”
Toomey’s memoir intersperses his own homosexual energies and sensibilities with historical events and Roman Catholic theology over six decades to the 1970s, dropping along the way the names of famous writes like Jimmy Joyce, Tom Eliot, Will Maugham like sweet wrappers.
The very familiarity of the names is another indication of an author (Toomey) intent to dazzle, erudite, for whom a huge English vocabulary is not enough, as he expropriates other languages to his own use. “Venerean strabismus” – whatever that means – is a family trait; rain “tonitruated terribly.”
Yet this Toomey, sometimes like, sometimes unlike Burgess, is a writer of popular fiction, who looks down upon his sister’s composer husband although he has nevertheless won an Oscar for his film music, and who maybe is trying just a bit too hard.
Ford Maddox Ford, a noted critic as well as author, sums him up on reading a particularly pompous phrase in his typescript: “'benedicent numen' my arse.”
Toomey, allegedly loosely based on the character of Maugham, cannot be trusted as an old man to get his facts right (see Wikipedia on him as an unreliable narrator) – and the constant cabaret of post-war writers reads like the fantasy that Woody Allen was to create in Midnight in Paris.
But the incident of having his house in Malta seized by the government actually happened to an irate Burgess, whose interest in a conservative Catholic theology is at the heart of the book.
His Carlo – a conflation of real prelates – becomes Pope Gregory XVII with an ecumenical mission to derestrict the faith and to exorcise devils – both with disastrous consequences.
Toomey is homosexual with much of the account of his early years obsessed with recurrent tumescence – which like his overblown story of an all-male garden of Eden the reader is best advised to take as a send-up.
However, Burgess is clever enough to take the St. Michael while still entering into a serious discussion on morality.
How unreservedly are we to take Carlo’s brilliant but dangerous sermon on the difference between satanic evil and human sin? God creates man for procreation, he argues, but also grants him freedom of choice. For Toomey there is no choice, but a dichotomy: which God does he obey, Carlo’s or the one who determined that he should be homosexual?
For a writer of lightweight fiction, Toomey comes up with remarkable insights. “It is for the reader to see in the book the motives of human actions and of the motives behind the social forces which judge those actions which we call a system of morality,” he writes. And again, man “does not will his own wilfulness. If that is contradiction, it is because human language disposes to contradiction.”
Toomey, or Burgess, or both? The former may be an unreliable narrator but he’s a wonderfully entertaining one too, who can describe a Hollywood starlet with a smile “like a piano concerto” or envisage the gluttonous Carlo “busy sucking an orange as a weasel might suck a brain.”
This is a huge book in every sense, as Bernard Levin said - the longest Booker nominee perhaps until Paul Auster's 4321 nearly 40 years later. But it never felt like a slog, and the pop of ideas and words kept me going back to get the best out of it.

re-reading a first edition now. i remember thinking this book was the most interesting, epic, intelligent book when i read it back in high school... we'll see what i think ten years later.

Well, I'd probably still give it a lot of stars, very interesting, certainly entertaining, but maybe not as satisfying as I remember.

Suprisingly I found this the most accessible out of all Burgess's work that I've read. A wonderful pseudo- metafiction autobiography of the life of Kenneth Toomey it questions religion - the Catholic church in particular, sexuality, family, power, greed, relationships, and a whole host of other things and themes to numerous to remember. For the complexity of the novel and Toomey's life, loves, and family it is a surprisingly snappy read and thoroughly engaging. It was a good introduction to Burgess's linguistic expertise, the subtlety of which is mostly lost on me, thought not unappreciated.
This is a novel I savored without realising it. It was like popping out to a well known local restaurant just down the road for a long cozy meal without having to be reminded that the restaurant has three michelin stars. (We don't have such a restaurant just down the road, incidentally; it has one star.)
I particularly enjoyed the play on metafiction that was woven through the novel, popping up in unexpected places at just the right time. We are told right from the off that the narrator will comment and we develop an easy familiarity with him throughout.

Er zitten hilarische en ook wel aangrijpende hoofdstukken in, maar ook stukken die me veel moeite hebben gekost. Niet het meesterwerk dat ik had verwacht.

Let me preface this review by saying that Burgess is an astonishing intellect. If a writer, or reader wants to learn something new, be it word or cultural concept, it is well-advised you keep a dictionary and pen handy. For this I am always grateful.
That's the good news.
Bad News?
This book (at nearly 700 pages) for all it's erudite meanderings, is 500 pages too long. The amount of (literal) religious and intellectual pontificating is stifling (sorry Mr. Burgess) dry, dull and boring. To this I add BOORISH in the extreme. One gets the idea that A.B. used this vehicle to add everything he ever learned about (ugh) church doctrine (Catholicism in particular), homosexuality (he does seem rather overly-fascinated) and every lofty principle know in Western literature. (other than crafting a novel with characters the reading public can relate to.)
This is the third novel by Burgess I've read. I'll probably read another, but not before taking a cultural shower.
P.S. Burgess, for all his intellect, appears to be an elitist and a racist with little or no understanding of other cultures than his own.
It's a very bad sign when a reader can't wait for a book to simply...END.
This is not the review I wanted to give. I'm disappointed. For a mind of such brilliance, Burgess makes the worst mistake any novelist can make by creating a pompous tome with little regard for the reader or the simple act of telling a good, satisfying story.

The life and times of the Pope's gay brother-in-law. Even more acidic than that synopsis sounds. Horrifying stop at a pseudo-Jonestown just to liven things up.