Earthly Powers


Earthly Powers is a panoramic saga novel of the 20th century by Anthony Burgess first published in 1980. It begins with the "outrageously provocative" first sentence: "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."
On one level it is a parody of a "blockbuster" novel, with the 81-year-old hero, Kenneth Toomey, telling the story of his life in 82 chapters. It "summed up the literary, social and moral history of the century with comic richness as well as encyclopedic knowingness", according to Malcolm Bradbury.
The novel appeared on the shortlist for the Booker Prize in the year of its publication but lost out to William Golding's Rites of Passage. In an October 2006 poll in The Observer, it was named joint third for the best work of British and Commonwealth fiction of the last 25 years.

Plot summary

On his eighty-first birthday, retired homosexual writer Kenneth Toomey is asked by the Archbishop of Malta to assist in the process of canonisation of Carlo Campanati, the late Pope Gregory XVII and his brother-in-law. Toomey subsequently works on his memoirs, which span the major part of the 20th century.

Themes