The Burgess bibliography lists twenty-one novels. (There are rumors of esoterica under a pen name.) "The Long Day Wanes," an autobiographical trilogy set in Malaya, launched the Burgess canon. It remains perhaps his most poignant, unguarded performance. "A Clockwork Orange" brought celebrity when it was made into a striking movie. But the fiction is subtler than Stanley Kubrick's package and points to that in Burgess's politics and alertness to science-fiction which connects his writings to those of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. "Honey for the Bears" is both a political fable and an ingenious meditation on language. It is one of a cluster of works, fiction and nonfiction, in which Burgess seeks an imaginative grip on the ominous charms of the Russian tongue and of its native speakers. "Enderby," "Nothing Like the Sun," and "ABBA ABBA" form a sparkling trio. They are studies of the writer's odd condition, of the pathologies and carnivals of poetic inspiration. The first is a wry mirroring of Burgess himself; the second is just about the only convincing fictional recreation we have of the young Shakespeare; the third is a witty but also moving evocation of Keats in the season of his passing. "Napoleon Symphony," a novel on Beethoven, combines Burgess's frank obsession with the titans of the past and his virtuoso knowledge of music, his rare cunning in finding a verbal counterpoint to musical effects (another decisive link with Joyce). "1985," a "semi-fiction," begins where Orwell and "A Clockwork Orange" left off. "Moses" and "Man of Nazareth" are potboilers aimed at, occasioned by, more or less Neronian treatments on television and film. Yet even here there are touches of mandarin originality. All in all, a prodigious catalogue.

Take its several items, add to them ingredients from Burgess's nonfiction, from his monographs on Joyce and on the English language, from his portrait of Hemingway and other forays into Americana, top off with some of his acrobatics of translation, and you will have what Coleridge called, self-teasingly, an omnium-gatherum. Burgess's collectanea—another word beloved of listmakers and lexicographers—masks itself in the guise of a leviathan novel, "Earthly Powers."… And there are spacious stretches of fiction in it. But it is Anthony Burgess's polymath persona, his cat's lives, the appetites of his intellect, the syncopations of thought and feeling so peculiarly his own which furnish the great creature with its life force and (partial) unison. (pp. 156, 159)

Connoisseurs of Somerset Maugham's life and manner will almost "preconsciously"—and therein lies Burgess's control—pick up the underlying thread. They will know within moments that Burgess has undertaken the implausible task of composing the memoirs of an eighty-one-year-old panjandrum and world celebrity of letters who is a homosexual and, under the alias of Kenneth Marchal Toomey, none other than Willie Maugham. (p. 159)

The "Maugham level" is adroitly sustained. "Willie" is himself often alluded to in the third person, and his tales of empire and sunset lust are subtly interwoven with Burgess's own Malaya. The style of the first-person narrative wickedly renders the aging carnivore's malice, sexual needs and panics, self-punishments, and bitchy hauteur. Here is a memorable study of an immensely successful middlebrow writer cursed with just that dram of unsparing lucidity which shows him, which makes him discern in the judgment of others, the final fiasco: the ephemerality of his most acclaimed works. Burgess's ability to slip into the old man's flaccid hide, to bring to fetid yet poignant expression the sexual lunges and humiliations of the old and of the invert, is uncanny. But writers have long been Burgess's meat, and they crowd this canvas: Joyce, Steinbeck, Huxley, J. B. Priestley, Arnold Bennett, either in propria persona or transparently referred to, together with dozens of lesser lights. (p. 160)

The other main strand in "Earthly Powers" is the saga of Don Carlo Campanati…. Campanati—and the bells peal literally in his name—is among the most ambitiously conceived, intellectually exciting agents in recent fiction.

Dozens of subplots wind around these two main stems…. Much of the latter part of the book is taken up by an often acute but hurriedly imagined presentation of the Manson case, of the mass suicide at Jonestown, and of a general slide of young America into mysticism and mindless violence. As with one of Beethoven's unwilling codas, so with "Earthly Powers" one has the impression not so much of a logical close as of a halt, reluctantly imposed, on a continuing pulse of energy.

This is a taxing novel. Not only because of the innumerable conundrums, acrostics, cross-echoes, veiled citations, and historical-literary references that make up its opulent texture. Not only because of a vocabulary in which terms such as "metathesis" and hints out of "Finnegans Wake" are common. Not only because a reader innocent of Christian soteriology, English metrics, and antique mythology will be deprived of numerous apprehensions and pleasures. "Earthly Powers" is taxing simply because it has set out to reclaim for the current art of the novel those domains of intellectual debate, of political modelling, of formal and anarchic religiosity, of adult confrontations with humbling sexuality and the wastage of death which have been, so very largely, yielded to high journalism, to discursive prose, and to the uneasy hybrid of "fact/fiction." Burgess honors his readers in purposing them to be almost as omnivorously aware and intelligent as he is.

At a first reading, one is not confident that the venture has "come off"—that the monster has, in Henry James's phrase, achieved "deep-breathing and organic form."…

["Earthly Powers" is] a feat of imaginative breadth and of intelligence which lifts fiction high. The whole landscape is the brighter for it. (pp. 160-62)