Novel: Earthly Powers

Overview
Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers (1980) is a panoramic, satirical, and deeply erudite novel narrated by Kenneth Toomey, an aging, celebrated, and self-mocking British novelist who has spent a lifetime in exile as an openly gay man. From the vantage of his eighty-first year, Toomey is summoned in Malta by an archbishop to attest to a miracle that could help canonize Carlo Campanati, an Italian cleric who rose to the papacy as Gregory XVII. The request ignites Toomey’s sprawling memoir, which unspools across continents and decades, binding the rise of a worldly churchman to the career of a worldly writer, and setting private appetites against public power in the crucible of the twentieth century.

Plot
The framing request to certify a miracle sends Toomey back through the episodic story of his life: youthful literary ambition in London; bohemian years in Paris; work in Hollywood; postings and escapes in colonial Southeast Asia; and an eventual retreat to Mediterranean islands. His path repeatedly crosses that of Carlo Campanati and the Campanati family, whose piety, pragmatism, and political instinct propel Carlo upward through the Church. Toomey, who has been censored and condemned by Catholic authorities, both fears and is fascinated by this embodiment of ecclesiastical authority.

Major episodes showcase Burgess’s breadth: Toomey’s brushes with great modernists; his loves and losses under the shadow of legal and social repression; the shocks of fascism and war; and the postwar rise of mass media and mass belief. Central among these is an exorcism or healing attributed to Carlo in a colonial setting and later echoed, darkly, by a Jonestown-like catastrophe of cultic mass suicide. The alleged miracle becomes the hinge on which the novel turns: what seemed a sign of grace may have seeded fanaticism, and the Church’s desire to stamp the event as holy collides with Toomey’s memory of ambiguity, manipulation, and unintended consequences.

As the memoir winds forward to meet the frame, Toomey confronts the demand for his signature. His recollection is both confession and cross-examination, of himself, of art, and of institutional religion. The book closes on the unresolved tension between conscience and expedience, memory and myth, as the machinery of sainthood hums on.

Characters and Structure
Kenneth Toomey is a reflective, unreliable, and witty guide whose camp irony is tempered by loneliness and survivor’s guilt. Carlo Campanati, worldly and shrewd, is as much politician as priest, a figure who sincerely seeks good while mastering the levers of influence. Around them spin lovers, agents, impresarios, bishops, and tyrants, a gallery that lets Burgess thread private lives through public cataclysms.

The novel’s architecture is contrapuntal: a present-day ecclesiastical inquiry interleaves with long, luxuriant set pieces from Toomey’s past. The recurrence of motifs, performance, possession, sanctity, scandal, binds disparate locales into a single moral argument.

Themes
Earthly power, Church, state, celebrity, money, presses constantly on inner life. Burgess interrogates sainthood as a human construct, miracles as stories curated for ends, and art as both solace and compromise. Sexual identity is not only Toomey’s vulnerability but his vantage, sharpening his critique of moral hypocrisy. History appears as a battleground of narratives, where the urge to mythologize competes with the obligation to witness.

Style and Significance
Burgess’s prose is exuberant, allusive, and musical, blending high wit with grotesque comedy and sudden tragedy. The novel functions as a summation of twentieth-century anxieties and seductions, and as a meditation on how lives are recruited by institutions seeking legitimacy. Its title points to the tug-of-war between the sacred and the temporal, with Burgess refusing easy verdicts on either.