It is very near the end of Earthly Powers that the narrator, Kenneth Marchal Toomey, now eighty-one years old, sits in a theater in Rome watching an old film version of three of his short stories. The audience is composed mostly of young people who neither understand nor appreciate what they are watching. One of those stories, the last, involves the perpetration of meaningless violence by thugs who know full well the value of the priceless artifacts and manuscripts they are destroying.
Toomey leaves the theater only to be beaten up in an alley by four boys. True, they have a purpose in assaulting him, which is to steal his watch and money, but of far greater importance is the gratuitous viciousness of their attack. It is a sick and demented malignancy, as motiveless in its extremism as anything Iago could contrive.
Together, the two scenes are a commentary on the book’s major theme. One scene occurs inside the theater, the other outside; one is imaginary, the other is gruesomely real; one is the product of Toomey’s youth, the other is an event that befalls him in his advanced years. Thus the novel seems to say that in whatever country Toomey finds himself, whether England or Italy, whatever his artistic status, whether as a young, struggling author or an elderly commercial success, no matter what his circumstances, he cannot escape the inherent viciousness of man, that inexplicable compulsion to cause hurt even where there is nothing to be gained. And, of course, the novel implies, neither can the reader.
The idea will be a familiar one to those Anthony Burgess readers who know A Clockwork Orange (1962). Alex and his droogies are evil in a way that seems to defy explanation. Similarly, the four Italian youths who set upon Toomey have no reason to beat him mercilessly, yet beat him they do. The question Burgess thereby propounds is critical in Earthly Powers: what is the source of this evil in man? Other related questions also emerge. Why is this evil tolerated by a Christian God? What is its relationship to good, and is man by nature a principle of good or evil? If the purpose of creating both good and evil is to permit man a free choice, else he would not be capable of loving God, how does one explain the “evil” of, say, homosexuality, a condition which a person does not “will” upon himself?
The principal characters of the novel are Toomey, a homosexual novelist of mediocre talent, and his brother-in-law, Don Carlo Campanati, a Catholic priest who later becomes Pope Gregory XVII. Narrated in retrospect by Toomey, the novel follows a chronological sequence beginning in the early years of World War I and ending about 1971. It records the major events of Toomey’s life as well as his occasional meetings with Carlo and other members of the Campanati family.
Toomey and Carlo, then, are basically Burgess’ spokesmen—the former a moral voice which is puzzled by the fact of God’s making him as he is and the latter a voice for the Church both as it is and as it should be. Toomey, born a Catholic, falls away from the Church at an early age, largely because he recognizes that his homosexuality has been inflicted upon him by God. Commanded to be sexually pure by the Church, yet cognizant that he cannot be other than he is, Toomey simply rejects the faith. His argument is a forthright one: the God of my glands has made me a homosexual but the God of my Church forbids me to be thus. Unable to find either peace or common sense in this paradox, Toomey pushes away his Catholicism.
Carlo, on the other hand, articulates the ethic of free will. Man is not born in original sin if, by that expression, one means a predisposition to sin. Rather, man is good because God is good. Any evil that man chooses is the result of his willful election, not of some state, such as Toomey’s homosexuality, that has been visited upon him. Thus, where Toomey places the responsibility for his sin upon the God who made him so, Carlo refuses to acknowledge that sin is anything other than man electing the evil which originates in Satan.
Toomey and Carlo plainly constitute a dialectic; and homosexuality is merely an exemplum of life’s numerous moral dilemmas. In the end, neither the neat dismissal of Catholicism by Toomey nor the conventional platitudes of Carlo are wholly satisfying. The reader senses that the answers, if there are any, perhaps lie somewhere in the middle between these extremes or in another sphere of inquiry.
Carlo presents an additional problem in the novel for he is a paradox of saint and sinner, dogmatic priest and ecumenical champion. The book begins with Toomey, now aged, being approached by a Catholic archbishop with the aim of getting Toomey to validate a miracle he saw performed by the late Pope Gregory XVII when the latter was a young priest. The Church wants to canonize Carlo, thus in a literal sense he is (or soon will be) a “saint.” Yet, he is also manifestly a sinner, given both to gluttony and gambling as is seen on numerous occasions in the book. Dogmatic on certain subjects—for example, marriage, adultery, and fornication—that dogmatism increases, or at least is not sufficiently challenged, when he becomes pontiff. Yet, at the same time, Carlo is anything but an uncompromising, orthodox Roman Catholic priest. In his earlier years, for example, he was openly political, a fierce denouncer of Mussolini and, later, an exponent of Marxism. He was also a spokesman for ecumenicism. In Carlo’s character, then, Burgess presents the paradox inherent in the Christian faith, which explains why some characters love Carlo while others hate him and nearly all are greatly puzzled by him. Like the Christian God, he both demands too much of man (thus his emphasis on free will) and yet is ready to love and forgive. Sympathetic with human weakness, he will not tolerate it. In his sermons and exhortations he sounds like a gloss on God’s arguments in Paradise Lost.
Related to the problems of free will and the origin of evil are two other of Burgess’ favorite themes: absolute versus relative morality, and evil not as an abstraction but as a real presence in the world.
It is words such as “faith,” “duty,” and “truth” that bring Toomey near to tears. He understands that they do not signify mere abstractions, however much their verbal nature alters from language to language, but concepts of the heart which have lasting value in the concrete events of life. These truths are tested by actions, not by words. Thus, when he is betrayed by such lovers as Geoffrey Enright and Val Wrigley, Toomey feels more than the loss of their physical presence; he agonizes over the betrayal itself, the fact of their having no loyalty, no love, no honor. It is important to realize on this subject of Absolutes that Burgess is not talking only of Toomey and his lovers’ betrayals but more generally of the modern age. The absence of faith has spread beyond religion to other statements of value. Society no longer believes in faith, truth, or duty. It no longer commends these values to its people or urges them to have a faith in its efficacy. Therefore, with the absence of faith has come an absence of order in the world. Individuals betray others; some, such as the four Italian youths, prey violently on their fellow man. Even whole nations have abandoned all sense of eternal verities. In the novel, readers see Britain scorning those authors whose works smack of homosexual or blasphemous themes and bringing those writers to trial. The horrors of Nazism are seen during World War II; and the Maltese government is witnessed quite literally thieving property from Toomey under the flimsiest pretenses. Burgess’ conclusion is obvious: individuals, groups, and nations have become the Age of Nonbelievers. Shorn of religious faith and quick to abandon absolute truths, people have left themselves with nothing to hold on to.
Is it implausible to regard the evil in man, and perhaps even in his nations, as demonic possession? That thought is Carlo’s, and throughout the book, as he attempts to heal the sick and cast out demons, the idea comes to have considerable attraction. Indeed, how else can one explain the enormity of human evil, those acts of barbarism which, in their sheer savagery, are monstrous? Carlo would have it that other conventional explanations, such as Freud’s, are really alternative ways of defining evil itself, not some condition which substitutes for evil. (He remarks that Freud would have made an excellent priest.) Carlo’s explanation of evil is straightforward and simple. Satan is not an abstraction but an absolute, a living presence; and the evil which besets one is no creation of the mind but a vital force to combat.
Anyone who has read much of Burgess’ work knows that language itself is often one of his dominant themes. So is the role of the writer as truth-teller. In Earthly Powers, both ideas are abundantly, even lavishly, treated. This is one of those novels that has to be read with dictionary in hand—a good dictionary. Not only Toomey but also most of the other characters are word merchants. The book abounds with puns, wordplay (in at least a half-dozen languages), small jokes, and clever verbal conundrums which test every bit of linguistic sensitivity the reader can muster. There are times when the novel is overbearingly talky, but that is almost inevitable in a work of this type. It is itself a “talking-out,” as it were, a vehicle by which Toomey attempts to order through language the vast materials of his active past life. Writing becomes the meaning-making activity in Earthly Powers. As Toomey endeavors to recollect past events, then struggles with the truth of writing them, one appreciates how fully Burgess develops his theme that in verbal creation there is at once a commitment to the highest form of truth.
Impressively long and challengingly cerebral, Earthly Powers is a rare achievement. On a sizable canvas, Burgess has room to create with large strokes. The characters are numerous. The settings span the globe: Malta, Africa, the United States, Britain, France, Italy, and so on. With his gifted background, notably in music, Burgess draws heavily upon the sister arts for his metaphors and other developmental techniques. As a result, Earthly Powers is not merely a good novel but a brilliant one, fully deserving to be regarded as among the best of this past decade.