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Title: Earthly Powers (Burgess, Anthony)
Score:
Author: Anthony Burgess
Rating: Not available
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Review of Earthly Powers (Burgess, Anthony)

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Comments for Earthly Powers (Burgess, Anthony)

• Posted on 2009-11-01
  Great, but tough read.....
  
  Intersting and well done, but lots of foreign phrases and obscure words. Still trying to figure out the "message". Although the protagonist is gay he seems homophobic, and since Burgess was married and seemingly straight, very well done. Kind of like Gore Vidal in the sense of being gay, but not really living that way.
  
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• Posted on 2009-01-03
  great story, but have multiple dictionaries handy
  
  'Earthly Powers' is quite a read, both good and bad. It's overall story, the memoirs of a gay British novelist, is quite interesting. His journeys around four continents, living through two world wars, and experiencing the most curious adventures with bizarre characters are never boring. But the author puts too much into it. I don't see the need for having a great many passages written in foreign languages (German, French, Italian, Latin, Malay, others), especially when unaccompanied by translations. Although I have greatly enjoyed other works by Anthony Burgess, 'Earthly Powers' comes off as rather pretentious and overly cerebral. He should have been more considerate of the reader.
  
  
  Bottom line: I would recommend the similar 'Any Human Heart' by William Boyd. Like 'Earthly Powers', it delivers a great story but it doesn't let the reader drown in uber-intellectual verbage.
  
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• Posted on 2007-10-27
  Confabulations
  
  This book, like much of Burgesss's output, is sui-generis. Yes, our narrator, Toomey, by Burgess's own admission, is based on Somerset Maugham, but he is also based on Burgess himself----For those who missed the Burgessian word play here: "Two of me". The word play is one of the things I delighted in about this book, so is the arcane vocabulary. For readers who detest fun with abstruse linguistics this is Not the book for you----For all others, you'll love coming across, time and again, words like (off the top of my head) "cecity".
  
  But, as almost all reviewers have noted, this book is also a kind of roman a clef of historic personages, literary and otherwise, populating the Twentieth Century - literary and otherwise - from Henry James to Jim Jones. This effect does, as another reviewer has noted, become tedious after a bit, as does the theological casuistry strewn throughout the book, another one of Burgess's - as he calls himself, a "lapsed Catholic" - obsessions. He once told critic Harold Bloom, "I'll see you in Limbo, Bloom!" - But I digress. At their worst, these parts come across as preachy. - Burgess gave a 1985 interview with Donald Swain (to which you can listen online at Wired for Books) in which he repeats verbatim several points Toomey makes in his Wodehousian broadcast for the Nazis herein. It's just a tad off-putting. But Joyce, Burgess's greatest literary influence, can be off-putting and Jesuitical at times too.
  
  So, I'm ready to forgive Burgess/Toomey this theological muddle in light of the splendid, erudite dialogues and cutting wit that permeate the book from first page to last. This book truly is a swan song for literacy and art. As Toomey/Burgess says in the early going:
  
  "I believed that writers were fine people and the legislators of the world and so on, but I was already desperately out of date. The future belonged to the universal eye, to be tricked and overfed with crude images; it did not belong to the imagination."
  
  And, well, look around you.
  
  
  Toomey has as the tentative title for this narrative (revealed in the last few pages of the book) Confabulations, a title I like much better than Earthly Powers. Perhaps it's what Burgess wanted to call it himself. But I don't know this as a fact. So, I'll simply appropriate it for my review title-----and trust that it incurs no unintended consequences.
  
  
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• Posted on 2007-09-08
  Great Read
  
  The only knowledge I'd had of Burgess was through his novel "A Clockwork Orange," which I loved, so when I saw "Earthly Powers" at the bookstore over twenty years ago, I bought it, hoping that it would have the same flavor. Wrong! I couldn't get into it at that time, a story of an aged homosexual and his relationship with a priest who becomes the pope, it seemed boring to me so I set it aside until 2007. I'm glad I did, because now I feel mature enough to absorb and understand a lot of what Mr. Burgess had to say in this novel and thoroughly enjoyed it.
  
  This is an epic of a novel, chronicling the dual lives of the protagonist, the writer Kenneth Toomey, and his brother-in-law's brother, Carlo Campanati, an Italian priest who eventually becomes pope. The book spans several decades and touches on deep philosophical issues of religion, homosexuality, fascism, and more. I thought the characters were richly drawn, and the way Burgess weaves the character's family together over the decades is masterful. I love the way Burgess uses a repetition of symbols or themes throughout the book: greedy eating, being victimized, the loutishness of youth, etc. It created an extra element of depth that kept me enthralled throughout the whole novel. It's very readable and Burgess's portrayal of homosexuality seemed very accurate to me.
  
  I was a little bit put off by a lot of the philosophizing over religion, but I think it all tied together at the remarkable ending. To me, this book was about non-belief and how living without a "belief system" can be me more moral and loving than tying oneself to a dogmatic faith that can ultimately lead to corruption.
  
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• Posted on 2007-03-01
  The 20th century as seen by Burgess
  
  I chose Earthly Powers as my introduction to Anthony Burgess only because I found this novel on my parent's bookshelf. Little did I know that this book was considered by many to be Burgess' pinnacle novel in the form of fiction. Published in 1980, Earthly Powers is a novel which basically outlines the historical situation of western society in the early half of the 20th century and although most of the characters in the novel are fictitious, a lot are based upon real-life people.
  
  Earthly Powers heavily discusses the impact and reaction of homosexuality in society during these years. There is serious discussion upon the development and political stances of the Catholic Church and also how these positions affected people. This religious theme was contrasted with further contemplation upon the development of atheism in the heavily catholic families of France and Italy. Burgess also slips in a lot of his own opinions on some of the 20th century's greatest literary figures such as James Joyce, Rudyard Kipling and H.G. Wells and how and why these men were raised into sublimity.
  
  The only quality this novel displays which many people might find a hindrance is the heavy use of pretentious vocabulary. There was extensive use of words of which I had no understanding of and had never seen used and although this is good in moderation, when used excessively it becomes quite a disturbance for some people. I would definitely recommend those who decide to read this novel to have a good quality dictionary nearby.
  
  To finalize I would state that this book portrays a very original and educational approach to societal development during these seminal years of modern culture and I would recommend this novel to most people who have an open mind about such matters.
  
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