Mr. Burgess, who has in "Earthly Powers" made a remarkable recovery from a series of indifferent fictions that began with "MF," chooses to write entirely from the point of view of an octogenarian homosexual….

To be sure, the heterosexuals in "Earthly Powers" fare almost as poorly as the homosexuals, once Mr. Burgess punches the total bar on his adding machine, but the homosexuals range from the opportunistic to the nasty and seem, in the scheme of the novel, to deserve their misery.

As if this moralizing were not sufficiently scandalous, Mr. Burgess invents a twin moon for Toomey, Don Carlo Campanati, a fat priest and exorcist who becomes the people's Pope. Carlo, with the changes he proposes to the Mother Church, sounds suspiciously like Pope John XXIII, except that he may himself be an agent of diabolism. The moons of Toomey and Carlo, in perfect opposition, orbit around a planet we might as well call God, if God in fact bothers to be there. Perhaps all the gravity comes from the devil. We ought to know more about the Arian heresy….

Mr. Burgess is as shameless as Dickens; he won't stop plotting; he just can't help himself. One of his points is that memory is a plot.

The usual Burgess obsessions are to be found in "Earthly Powers." They include food, music, linguistics, Joyce, Dante, Shakespeare, the Far East and the Mediterranean and movies. New to me are his preoccupations with mint, dentistry, cigarette lighters and the adjectives "venerean" and "prolettic." All are deployed in the service of a meditation on the nature of evil….

Mr. Burgess is prodigal. He intends to woo us on behalf of the traditional novel, while making fun of the traditional novelist and at the same time sending up the postmodernism which junks coherence and guilt, which would make of empirical reality a dull linoleum. He has written an entertainment about God, after the laughter stops. No wonder Toomey's brother Tom dies young; only a saint is allowed to make jokes.

Mr. Burgess is also quite serious. He is telling us that St. Nicholas was cheated; that if God is the Father we have come to know, we desperately need a Mother Church; that neither art nor propaganda can outshout senseless evil; that "the horror of surfeit" makes even language throw up. Still, certain words oblige us to cry, and he names them: home, duty, love, faith, shame, pity, death.

I'd rather Toomey weren't a pastiche. Tom, as a character, is insufficiently developed. Hortense is an angry ghost. But the astonishing Mr. Burgess has somehow managed to graft James Joyce onto Somerset Maugham, with a demented laugh track. "My destiny," says Toomey, "is to create a kind of under-literature that lacks all whiff of the subversive." Mr. Burgess, in his best novel, subverts.