Earthly Powers is a panoramic saga of the 20th century by Anthony Burgess first published in 1980. On one level it is a parody of a "blockbuster" novel, with the 81-year-old hero, Kenneth Toomey (allegedly based on British author W. Somerset Maugham), telling the story of his life in 81 chapters. It "summed up the literary, social and moral history of the century with comic richness as well as encyclopedic knowingness", according to Malcolm Bradb...
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Earthly Powers is a panoramic saga of the 20th century by Anthony Burgess first published in 1980. On one level it is a parody of a "blockbuster" novel, with the 81-year-old hero, Kenneth Toomey (allegedly based on British author W. Somerset Maugham), telling the story of his life in 81 chapters. It "summed up the literary, social and moral history of the century with comic richness as well as encyclopedic knowingness", according to Malcolm Bradbury. In an October 2006 poll in The Observer, it was named the third best work of British and Commonwealth fiction of the last 25 years (tied with Ian McEwan's Atonement, Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children).
On his eighty-first birthday, the gay writer Kenneth Toomey is asked by the archbishop of Malta to assist in the process of canonization of Carlo Campanati, the late Pope Gregory XVII. Toomey subsequently works on his memoirs, which span the major part of the...
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