Earthly Powers

Burgess opens with one of English fiction's most quoted first lines, Kenneth Toomey recalling being in bed with his catamite on his eighty-first birthday when the Archbishop arrives, and the sentence does real structural work beyond shock value: it announces immediately that Toomey, a wildly successful, closeted-then-not popular novelist modeled loosely on Somerset Maugham, will narrate the entire twentieth century's catastrophes through the lens of his own compromised, self-aware, thoroughly worldly perspective, never pretending to a moral high ground the material might seem to require. Toomey's decades crisscross Malaya, Chicago, wartime Europe, and Hollywood, brushing against Nazism, fascism, and eventually a cult's mass suicide, and Burgess uses Toomey's celebrity and his outsider's sexuality together to keep him perpetually present at history's worst moments without ever being its author.

The novel's real theological argument runs through Don Carlo Campanati, Toomey's brother-in-law, who rises from parish priest to Pope and asks Toomey, near the end of his own life, to testify for Carlo's canonization by recalling a miracle Carlo apparently performed decades earlier, healing a dying child in Chicago. Toomey's private, devastating discovery is that the healed child grows up to become the manipulative architect of a mass-suicide cult modeled directly on Jim Jones's Jonestown, which forces the novel's central question into the open: if Carlo's miracle was real, did his sanctity also underwrite an evil that wouldn't otherwise have existed, and does a genuine act of grace stop counting as grace once its consequences are traced far enough forward.

Burgess builds Toomey's career, and much of his personality, from Somerset Maugham's real life story: the enormous commercial success alongside critical condescension, the decades spent abroad partly to live more openly as a gay man than England allowed, and the late-life stockpile of secrets that a writer this famous could never fully hide. Toomey's homosexuality, treated across the novel's whole century-long span, from criminalization through the war years to a more permissive old age, lets Burgess track how radically the world's willingness to let Toomey simply exist changed within a single lifetime, without ever letting Toomey himself become merely a symbol of that change rather than a specific, vain, brilliant, self-serving man.