尘世权力 (1980)

Earthly Powers is a panoramic saga novel of the 20th century by Anthony Burgess first published on 13 October 1980. It begins with the "outrageously provocative" first sentence: "It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me."

On one level it is a parody of a "blockbuster" novel, with the 81-year-old hero, Kenneth Toomey (allegedly loosely based on British author W. Somerset Maugham), telling the story of his life in 82 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.

The novel appeared on the shortlist for the Booker Prize in the year of its publication but lost out to William Golding's Rites of Passage. In an October 2006 poll in The Observer, it was named joint third for the best work of British and Commonwealth fiction of the last 25 years (along with Ian McEwan's Atonement, Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children).

Plot summary

On his eighty-first birthday, retired homosexual writer Kenneth Toomey is asked by the Archbishop of Malta to assist in the process of canonisation of Carlo Campanati, the late Pope Gregory XVII and his brother-in-law. Toomey subsequently works on his memoirs, which span the major part of the 20th century.

Themes

The problem of evil

Censorship

Divorce

Domenico's brother Don Carlo's ascent to the papacy

Ecumenism

Exorcism

Pederasty

Gay rights

Hollywood

Terminal illness and euthanasia

The marriage of his sister Hortense to composer Domenico Campanati

The relationship between love and lust

Toomey's break with the Roman Catholic Church, which regards homosexual acts as intrinsically disordered

Places

England

France

Italy

Malaysia

Malta

Tangier, Morocco

Uganda

United States

Germany

Austria

Spain

Ireland

Monaco