The phenomena of demonic possession and exorcism seem to be taken seriously in Anthony Burgess's new novel [Earthly Powers]. Has Burgess himself been possessed by a scribbling demon? More than 20 novels in as many years, together with more than 20 titles in a variety of other genres—the record suggests that some agency not quite human might have been at work. Demons traditionally speak in many tongues, as does the polyglot Burgess, who is also capable of making up languages of his own (A Clockwork Orange and other novels, passim). The range of his productions, from children's books to studies of Joyce, hints at multiple possession, at the possibility that the name of Burgess's demon may be Legion. And now, as if all the other manifestations of occult influence had been largely diversionary, we are presented with what has been hailed as a Tolstoyan masterwork, a 600-page novel, 10 years in the making, that offers nothing less than the social, literary, and religious history of our times from World War I to the Jonestown massacre, with extensive stopovers for the Holocaust and the aggiornamento of John XXIII (herein known as Gregory XVII). Tolstoyan or Luciferian? That is the question with which the reviewer of Earthly Powers must wrestle. (p. 32)

So crammed is Earthly Powers with events and plot-turnings that a mere catalogue of them would run to many pages. Toomey is always Johnny-on-the-spot, always popping up where the action is. In this respect he is like Lanny Budd in that series of public-event novels (now forgotten?) that Upton Sinclair used to grind out. Some of this is entertaining, but there are disadvantages to the method. The namedropping is incessant and finally, as in real life, a bore. Too often the dialogue becomes portentous, weighed down by the necessity of speaking for history….

The characterization of Toomey suffers, I think, from his role as witness to the horrors of the age. Much of the time he seems less an agent in his own right than a reactor to the events swirling around him. Another problem is presented by the ready-made associations with Maugham. The loneliness in the midst of wealth, the betrayals endured, the self-deprecation of his art—these are now too familiar a part of the persona to interest or move us very much. The armoring of world-weariness, of irony, of knowingness, is burdensome to sustain over hundreds of pages. While we are clearly intended to sympathize with Toomey's homosexual plight and the anguish it causes him, we end up impatient with his poor taste in lovers….

The dialogue between Toomey and his lovers consists of little more than elaborate bitchiness, sprinkled with "my dears" and cruel or patronizing put-downs—just the sort of thing to give buggery a bad name. The forces of gay liberation have a perfect right to protest.

Carlo Campanati is a more complex creation than Toomey, less bound to his historical prototype. (p. 33)

Though the presentation of this robust and energetic figure seems warmly favorable, including as it does a number of blind spots and foibles, the wary reader begins to notice something dubious, even macabre, about some of the phenomena that accompany the appearances of this peripatetic cleric. He is always on hand for terrible events…. While he seems entirely on the side of the angels, could it be that all along he has been the secret agent of the one who, before his fall, had been the brightest angel of them all?… One can imagine the leer—or rictus, to use one of his favorite words—on the author's face as he inserts a pin into the image of the beloved pontiff. Is Earthly Powers to be read as a covertly reactionary attack upon the whole Johannine revolution, as vengeance for the abandonment of the Latin mass, as a reassertion of St. Augustine's defeat of the heretic Pelagius?

That would be to take the whole performance with undue gravity. Sensationalism—not moral or religious profundity—is what Burgess has to offer. For thick, greasy, loathsome detail, the scenes of exorcism in Earthly Powers match anything to be found in The Exorcist. The horrors of our century are real enough, and Burgess does full justice to them in Toomey's account of his visit to Buchenwald; but to these the author adds scenes of individual cruelty, disease, disfigurement …, and suffering that come to seem gratuitous. When the only pleasant, attractive, and wholesome young couple in the entire novel … go off on an anthropological visit to one of the new African states, the by-then experienced reader knows almost exactly what will befall them. The great theological issues—free will and predestination, God's curtailment of his own omniscience, original sin, the problem of evil—too often have the appearance of being little more than scaffolding upon which to hang glib oppositions. The Augustinian-Pelagian controversy has been used before by Burgess…. As a "Catholic" novel, Earthly Powers bears about as much relationship to the novels of Graham Greene and Mauriac as do Roger Peyrefitte's "exposés" of the inner workings of the Church Militant and Triumphant (The Keys of St. Peter, The Knights of Malta) which titillated and scandalized a wide international audience in the 1950s.

To give the devilish author his due, a good deal of entertainment is to be found in Earthly Powers. Burgess is, as he has demonstrated many times before, a clever, linguistically erudite spinner of words. He can be amusingly nasty on occasion. He purveys lots of rather specialized information. He has a nice instinct for the special, telling details of a period, though he does not always avoid anachronisms. And he can construct a dramatically vivid scene with the best of them—for instance, the Vatican conclave at which Carlo is elected pope after the sudden death of his just elected rival. But in a novel as long as Earthly Powers, Burgess is damaged by his own facility. The words come too trippingly; the sensationalism and sadism pall; the gossip grows tedious. Though much space is devoted to describing states of feeling and to (most irritable) expressions of feeling, nothing seems adequately felt. "Meaty," "fruity," "fatty,"… "flatulent"—such were the gustatory and alimentary adjectives that came to mind as I made my way through the most "oral" of novels, one in which every meal is described in loving detail and in which every spiteful impulse is fully voiced. (pp. 33-4)