Earthly Powers is a novel which engages twentieth-century personalities, events, ideas and problems in a way that makes David Lodge's How Far Can You Go? look like a parish magazine. In the process, it explores the dealings of fiction with the actual: fiction's kaleidoscopic scramblings and refractions of real bits and pieces into a vivid pattern, a pattern made in Earthly Powers out of the combination of an intellectual, witty scheme with the narrative shapings of a more traditional sequential novel.

This scheme is both intensely grim and, in the end, unexpectedly consoling. To write about it intelligibly, it is necessary to give away some of what come in the story as appalling surprises, including one particularly audacious fictional coup. To read it knowing its outcome will be a different kind of experience, and one, like knowing how Lear ends, that has its own bleak rewards. I can think of few recent fictions I would more willingly read again straight away….

Earthly Powers is full of … parodic brilliancies, as it is full of caricatured or modified people and events. But if it plays with the processes of fiction, with the transubstantiation of the actual into the preferred, Burgess does the actual itself with all his usual vividness. Gruesome and comic rough-trade scenes are closely realized…. And the natural world is conveyed with a Joycean indulgent rhetoric….

It would be possible to describe these and other aspects of Burgess's novel so as to suggest more not only of their separate value but of their inter-relationship, the way in which the narrative threads … in this sometimes apparently rambling Kunstlerroman come together. One would talk about Burgess's sensitive and unsentimental close-quarters treatment of Toomey's sexuality, and about the importance in the novel of music, about which, of course, Burgess here as elsewhere writes very well. One would talk, too, about the way he succeeds at the near-impossible business of writing in the artist's first person: a problem got over by Joyce through his artist's being, though vain, not yet successful, by Burgess through Toomey's being deeply and convincingly modest about the nature and value of his work—"Those of you here who aspire to be novelists", Toomey tells a crowd of American students, "do please remember that the mechanics of the craft are more important than angling for truths or changing the world. If your work changes the world, well, it will not be because of your purposing."

Toomey's own narrative makes this modesty unnecessary. Earthly Powers is a big, grippingly readable, extraordinarily rich and moving fiction by one of the most ambitiously creative writers working in English.