Earthly Powers, a novel on which Burgess worked for more than a decade, is structurally intricate in the way that Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1865-1869) is intricate. Burgess’ intimate and formal knowledge of music has motivated much of his writing, particularly his anti-utopian satire A Clockwork Orange (1962), in which the onomatopoeic qualities of the novel demonstrate the author’s ability to bring together the musicality of language and the formal structure of music into a book that resonates with the rhythmic patterns of speech. His more recent novel, The Pianoplayers (1986), again makes considerable use of musical structure, which Burgess considers a reflection of the quintessential structures in life and in human activity.

Added to Burgess’ knowledge of music is his keen understanding of the structural intricacies of James Joyce’s work, much of which the author demonstrates in Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader (1965; published in the United States in 1965 under the title Re Joyce).

It is significant in Earthly Powers that Kenneth Toomey was first seduced as a boy a week short of his fourteenth birthday in Dublin on June 16, 1904, the day on which the events in Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) take place in the same city. For Toomey, this day marked the loss of innocence, and Burgess clearly implies by his choice of locale and date that Joyce turned literature from its innocence with the publication of his most celebrated novel, a book that marks the beginning of modern literature.

The late 1940’s and the 1950’s opened the way for homosexual novels, which were much in vogue in that period. Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar (1948) and Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) were much-celebrated homosexual novels published in the same year in which Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) gave scientific credence to the fact that homosexuality is more widespread than many people had been willing to admit. These books were followed by James Barr’s Quatrefoil (1950), Alberto Moravia’s La disubbidienza (1948; Disobedience, 1950), Arthur Anderson Peters’ Finestere (1951), James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956), Tennessee Williams’ play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), and Edward Albee’s play The Zoo Story (1960), all homosexually oriented.

In Earthly Powers, however, Burgess is not writing a homosexual novel in quite the same way that the authors named above were writing homosexual works. Burgess is writing about an interesting, highly eminent man who happens to be homosexual. His homosexuality surely affects the way he lives his life, but ultimately he is accepted as the successful writer he is, and before his life ends, he regains much that earlier attitudes toward his sexual orientation had robbed him of: family, church, country.

In structure, Earthly Powers is symphonic, a colossal work whose convolutions keep it as interesting as the best-written mystery novels. The book’s intricate ironies, supported by consistent leitmotifs that keep them unified and credible, result in a product at times as deftly crafted as any in modern fiction.