By the time I had reached the end of [Earthly Powers] I had accumulated enough notes to make a modest book: a fact that bears witness to the sheer density of the writing, as well as the seriousness of its concern. It is unwise to skim. Only in retrospect can you identify what could safely have been skipped as supererogatory or duplicate. Since complaints will follow—grave matters incur grave complaint—let me say at the outset that Earthly Powers carries greater intellectual substance, more power and grim humour, more knowledge, than ten average novels put together.

[Why has Burgess created his hero, Toomey, homosexual?] Burgess is hardly an author whom one would suppose to be in search of new sensations. It could be … that, heterosex being so awful, homosex has to be a little better…. [It] would be no serious distortion to say that there is only one good gay here, and lots of bad gays. Possibly homosexuality is an extra twist of the thumbscrew Burgess customarily applies to his leading characters. Perhaps it is necessary that Toomey should be a Catholic, and a lapsed one, but lapsed for some reason other than mere intellectual doubt: God made him homosexual and thus forced him to reject God.

And the Word was God. Earthly Powers is theological and linguistic in equal proportions, quite properly. Less properly, it is too heavily both, in the sense that one can have too much of a good thing….

[Is Burgess] too clever for his own good? That is the sort of accusation made by people who really aren't all that bright themselves…. One is near to objecting to what is most Burgessian in Burgess, what one reads him for. There is a sickening, suffocating weight to this book. So, one is meant to be sickened and suffocated. At all events, it is egregiously difficult to say where the author has stepped over the line, because it is hard to know where to draw the line. It has to be one's sense of artistic rightness that draws it, not nervousness, gentility, frivolity or a semiliterate dislike for quibbles and puns. I believe that the author's obsessiveness … falls foul of the awful law of diminishing returns—in terms of quibbles as well as squalor and horrors—and incurs a penalty, though I am not sure how grave the penalty is. Irritation on the reader's part, at the least, followed by lapses of attention; at the most, a loss of credence. Oh for an occasional draught of Thomas Mann's coolness!