By Anthony Burgess (1917-93), this was published in 1980, and shortlisted for the Booker Prize that year (alongside A Month in the Country, by J.L. Carr).

It's only my second experience of Burgess, the first being his trilogy, The Long Day Wanes, which I read in 2002, and really liked. It's set in what was then Malaya, and the individual titles (which I completely didn't remember, and had to look up) are Time for a Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket, and Beds in the East. The diary of the day rates the first for "characters you feel you know; a mood that's sad, but not completely tragic; a nifty turn of phrase; and a humour that is off-beat and sometimes farcical, but not grotesque". The second one I found equally good, albeit more sombre (things are definitely falling apart by this stage, as is reflected in the various tragicomic fates of the characters). The third was perhaps the one I enjoyed least (too many slightly unsympathetic characters), but again I basically liked it. The whole thing was a smart evocation of colonial twilight during the Emergency in Malaya (here and here are some more recent takes).


Kuala Kangsar, 2011. Malaya features in Earthly Powers as well: "In Kuala Kangsar," says the hero, "I met, if I may be permitted the novelettish locution, my love"

This one, on the other hand...

It's clever. Very clever. But I didn't like it.

I didn't like the tone. I'm always slightly allergic to "archness" -- defined as the quality of being playfully mischievous or knowing, showing amusement but with a certain sense of superiority -- and this is arch to the nth degree. It's also lurid, self-consciously larger-than-life.

The narrator (Kenneth Marchal Toomey, a successful though not first-rate author, who is looking back over his life for reasons I'll come to in a minute) is largely sympathetic, but cringe-inducingly self-deprecating and vulnerable at times.

And from the famous first sentence, it sets out to be outrageous: "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."

All in all, I found it a somewhat uncomfortable read.

You're right, of course. If a book can make you react like that, it's generally good. I'm not really arguing with that. I'm just saying I didn't enjoy it.

The premise is brilliant. This visiting archbishop is trying to gather evidence to support the canonization of the late Pope, who started life as Carlo Campanati. Toomey knew him (and his family) well, and can bear witness (of sorts) to the saintliness-corroborating "miracle" he performed. While reviewing his relationship with Campanati, he takes us back through his own stormy life (a microcosm of a stormy century). And in the process, he lays before us some messy theological conundrums:

-- Why does God make gay people, and then decree their relations to be sinful?
-- Why does God allow good actions to have bad results?
-- Why does God thwart bad actions that might have prevented even worse actions?

I know that doesn't look very promising as an entertainment, but Burgess's talent is such that the book IS very entertaining. It rattles along, and you want to keep reading. But whereas for Sam Jordison, it's "a comedic tour de force", it didn't really do it for me comedically... It somehow felt a little too grotesque, too zanily 1970s, to produce more than a wary smile...


I think this cover represents everything I didn't like about the book itself...

***

There were many aspects I appreciated:

1. The depiction of gayness

This element resonated with Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man, which I wrote about recently. Toomey starts out a believing Catholic, but is told that his sexuality is incompatible with life within the Church. "You must give up this deadly sin," the priest he consults when he's 26 tells him. "You must vow never to commit it again." When he comes out to his mother, she tells him: "You are still my son and I love you with all a mother's heart but I think you must stay away from home until I can live with the shock. I pray that it is only a temporary thing as is sometimes so with boys in English schools and that it will end soon."

So he's shut out of Church, and driven away from his family (the beginnings of life-long sojourns abroad). Because it's very difficult in that climate to set up a gay "home", his relationships all have a transitory and/or risky quality to them. He suffers physical violence, and is fleeced on a regular basis by a string of gold-digging associates.

When he is prevailed on at one point to defend a gay writer who's facing a ban on his work, he testifies: "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... My own work as a creator of fiction has been severely harmed by the taboo on the depiction of the homosexual act of love. My own life has been spent in exile chiefly because of the draconian British rejection of the homosexual sensibility as a legitimate endowment. As a homosexual I speak up now for other homosexuals. And for homosexual art."


A fascinating collection of book covers



The limitations on gay relationships are all the more tragic given the paucity of genuinely admirable hetero pairings in this book. As M.A. Orthofer points out, all the relationships have "a rather unpleasant aggressive edge to them".

The character of Toomey, Burgess tells us, is modelled on W. Somerset Maugham. Both were gay; both had an interest in colonial Malaya; both had done well as playwrights. It's not really a flattering depiction, I would say, but it's not meant to be a hatchet job, either: "We do know that Burgess was fascinated by Somerset Maugham and his prolific writing career. Burgess wrote Maugham’s obituary for the Listener in 1965, and he prepared an edition of Maugham’s Malaysian Stories for publication by Heinemann Asia in 1969. His private library contains numerous copies of novels, plays and short stories by Maugham, as well as the biographies and memoirs by Robin Maugham, Frederic Raphael, Ted Morgan and Robert Calder."

Others detect touches of Evelyn Waugh in the character, too -- "as well as lashings of another never-quite-critically-acclaimed-enough author: Burgess himself. Like Toomey, Burgess had run-ins with the authorities in Malta, lived in self-imposed exile from 'dreary cold old England', relocated to New York and Malaya, and didn’t quite make a go of writing screenplays in Hollywood. Like Toomey, Burgess had fervently Catholic family members and was rather more wavering in his own faith."



2. The search for faith

It's a problem for anyone who believes in God to account for the fact that the world is such a goddam mess... Ultimately, you're left with free will as an explanation: God gives us free will, and we use it to destroy things.

Carlo Campanati believes that evil is all from the devil: "The urge to sin is in us, but sin presupposes the prior existence of evil, and that evil is not in us but in the Powers of Darkness that harry us... Do not be afraid. Even from the most noisome evil the most radiant good may spring."

Carlo is very progressive in many ways, but totally conservative in others (no contraception, no same-sex relationships, etc).

And even he can never predict what God is going to do... His own "miracle" occurs when he's visiting the hospital where his brother is dying. Despite his prayers, the brother still dies. Meanwhile, the child the priest also prays for recovers... For Carlo, though, it's an article of faith that God will do his good-out-of-evil thing.

Toomey has a different view of God: "Oh, I believe in him all right, whatever he is. The enigmatic Jehovah of the Old Testament. You don't know whether he's good or bad but he's there all right. Giving us a hard time when he bothers about us at all." However, having seen much evil in his long life, he's convinced that he knows where it comes from. Don't blame the devil, he says. Its all us.

At the heart of Earthly Powers, there's a bewildering array of conundrums for Toomey to ponder:

-- He is created with a certain sexual orientation, and then required not to act on it.
-- He reflexively foils an assassination attempt, but the intended victim is Himmler, who goes on to commit genocide.
-- He puts up the money for his nephew and his wife to go to Africa, where they're killed.
-- And, most significantly, of all, the child who is saved by Carlo Campanati's miracle ends up becoming the leader of a sect, and presiding over a Jonestown-like massacre...


Cagliari, 2024. "I had obtained an Italian visa at Nice, spent some weeks in Florence, taken a boat from Leghorn to Corsica, jumped across the narrow Strait of Bonifacio into Sardinia, then traveled slowly by train down the west coast to Cagliari..."

Burgess, explaining the genesis of the book, writes: "Perhaps it is too easy to think in terms of a perpetual war going on between God and the Devil: the universe is not sustained by so simplistic a dichotomy. Perhaps God, if he exists, is beyond good and evil and is merely an ultimate power to whom human morality is of no interest. He is on nobody’s side. The novel, tracing as it does the memories of a life which has seen plenty of public, as well as private, evil, presents not only the big moral problem but also the problem of free will. How free are we? ... I’m no theologian. All I can do as a novelist is present situations which perhaps theologians can explain, although I doubt it."

The author, says Jim Clarke, left the Catholic Church (largely because of "the terrifying manner in which Catholic doctrine was transmitted to the faithful when [he] was a youth"), but could never quite jettison his faith altogether. At one point, he contemplated a return to the Church -- but was put off by the "vulgarities" introduced by Pope John XXIII (partly the model for Carlo Campanati). Clarke quotes what he said about his theological trajectory: "‘I was brought up a Catholic, became an Agnostic, flirted with Islam and now hold a position which may be termed Manichee -- I believe the wrong God is temporarily ruling the world and that the true God has gone under."


Burgess notes that this was the original title he proposed for the novel: "It... comes out of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan and may be considered highly, Europeanly ambiguous. The air is full of devils and their prince evil. The novel is about the difficulty of deciding what is good and what is evil." The various translations of the book have gone in different directions: "In French, the book is known as Les Puissances des Tenebres (The Powers of Shadows); in German, Der Fuerst der Phantome (The Prince of Phantoms); in Italian, Gli Strumenti delle Tenebre (The Instruments of Darkness); and in Swedish, Jordiska Makter (Underground Powers)"

3. The meta quality of the writing

I always enjoy it when a writer messes with us... And from the beginning, you don't know quite where you are with this narrator. That first sentence, for example... Toomey invites us to admire his "arresting opening", suggesting artifice rather than candour in his account. Asked to recall the "miracle", he reminds us: "Writers of fiction often have difficulty in deciding between what really happened and what they imagine as having happened. That is why, in my sad trade, we can never be really devout or pious. We lie for a living."

In fact, he has already written Campanati's miracle into a short story, and he now struggles to reconstitute the historical facts it was based on. Of course, records and witnesses can be consulted. "But," he tells us, "the real question for me was: how far could I claim a true knowledge of the factuality of my own past, as opposed to pointing to an artistic enhancing of it, meaning a crafty falsification? In two ways my memory was not to be trusted: I was an old man, I was a writer. Writers in time transfer the mendacity of their craft to the other areas of their lives. In that trivial area of barroom biographical anecdotage, it is so much easier and so much more gratifying to shape, reorder, impose climax and denouement, augment here, diminish there, play for applause and laughter than to recount the bald treadmill facts as they happened. Ernest Hemingway, as I remembered well (but what do I mean by remembering well?), reached a stage where, even though he had virtually ceased to produce fiction, he was totally in thrall to its contrivances. He told me, and he was only in his fifties at the time, some years my junior, that he had slept with the beautiful spy Mata Hari... I knew, and records could confirm, that Hemingway had not yet even paid his first visit to Europe at the time when Mata Hari was executed..."

Caveat lector, then... (That thing about Hemingway, by the way, is apparently true.) Even Toomey has limits, though. He is aghast when, intending to write a novel about Stamford Raffles, he's asked by the publisher to drop the "Raffles" bit of the name (on the grounds that punters will confuse him with the gentleman thief...). "But good God man, I said, you can't falsify history like that..."



Jordison comments, "The only certainty -- or so it seems at first -- is that Kenneth Toomey is a special kind of unreliable narrator. After a short while, I started to believe that the very prose style of the novel is inauthentic, its ticks and proclivities belonging to Kenneth Toomey, rather than Burgess. This suspicion was amplified by frequent reminders that Toomey isn’t a good novelist... Burgess knows that no one will take Toomey’s writing too seriously -- and as the writer behind the writer, he himself, will be taken very seriously. But few others could go so expertly over the top."

This technique also reinforces the novel's discussion of religion and belief, says Jordison: "Just as Toomey must decide how much faith he can put in the Catholic church, so we as readers are left wondering about the boundaries between reality and fiction, and what we can and can’t take for truth in the real world. So we are left wondering how anyone can pronounce with any authority on the natural and the supernatural, the verifiable and the impossible."

4. The bits of travel

Toomey lives in a LOT of places. Malta. France. Malaya. Morocco. Etc.

And he does the sort of time-dividing that the rest of us aspire to: "I needed my regular dentist, Dr. Pes, on the Piazza Bologna in Rome... Distance no object. Teeth in Rome, silk shirts in Kuala Lumpur, leather goods in Florence, tea in Mincing Lane."


Catania, 2025. Everyone travels in this book... Toomey's brother-in-law, Domenico: "I must... be in Catania for Natale, Christmas that is. There is to be a concert in the Opera House. They are to play my little partita for string orchestra"

***

And so, inevitably, to what I didn't like:

1. The tone (as I've mentioned)

2. All the historical characters...

So many writers parade through these pages. Joyce, Shaw, Eliot, Ford, Pound, Colette, West, Gide... And so many other notable figures. I'm with Robert Towers: "The namedropping is incessant and finally, as in real life, a bore." And Robertson Davies: "Sometimes the reminders of history become intrusive... There is too much historical realism to be absorbed by the romance."

This is especially the case given -- as we've seen -- you can't actually rely on any of it... I like meta. I like the undermining of the fourth wall. I like the invitation to look twice at what we're being told. But, as always, I struggle a bit with a blatant mixture of fact and fiction. Burgess is completely open about what he's doing: "'Oh, there are a lot of lies in it,' he said, 'a lot of things which could not have happened -- my publishers were very worried that I might be making mistakes.' ... Although historical events anchor Toomey’s story in the real world, Burgess did not intend his fictional story to be constrained by historical research."

Jordison comments: "While many of the events and facts in the novel have real-world counterparts, many of them are deliberately incorrect or entirely fictional. Many of the writers he describes are real, but Toomey’s favourite isn’t. He writes: 'The reader will at least know of Jakob Strehler, since he was awarded the 1935 Nobel prize for literature ...' Yet how can we? The Nobel prize for literature was not issued that year. There are dozens, probably hundreds, maybe even thousands of similar inventions in the book, as well as misremembered dates, impossible meetings and inaccurate descriptions."

Insomma: Grand, ambitious erudite, provocative, but a little unsatisfying.


Taormina, 2025. Domenico again: "I had thought of trying to finish my opera in Pasi's house, outside Taormina..."