Analysis of Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 25, 2025

A novel of epic scope, Earthly Powers follows the careers of two dissimilar but parallel men of ambition: Kenneth Toomey, a pessimistic homosexual writer of popular works, and Carlo Campanati, a priest—and a brother-in-law to Kenneth—who rises to the position of pope and is under consideration for canonization after his death.

Burgess based the character of Kenneth on an amalgam of Noël Coward and W. Somerset Maugham and made him the first-person narrator of the novel; Carlo is based on Pope John XXIII. The action of the story covers the first 70 years of the 20th century and sprawls to numerous locations around the world. Burgess mixes real people into his fictional world and thinly disguises real events in his complex plot, such as the Jonestown mass suicide, or massacre, at the behest of Jim Jones.

Although the narrator is a homosexual, the novel is not a study of homosexuality per se; instead, it examines a much broader range of human behaviors, and in particular it explores the ways that good actions can come to evil ends.

The novel opens on Kenneth’s 81st birthday. He is living in Malta with a young lover—his “catamite”—when the archbishop calls on him to discuss Carlo Campanati, the late Pope Gregory XVII. To begin the canonization process that leads to sainthood, the performance of a miracle must be documented, and Kenneth had been present many years earlier in Chicago when Carlo, then still a priest, had miraculously saved a boy dying of tuberculosis by blessing him.

The archbishop’s request sets in motion Kenneth’s recollection of his own life and of his connection to Carlo. He did witness the event in question, but he also reveals the horrifying consequences that follow from saving that young man’s life: the young man later becomes the leader of a religious cult that murders a congressional representative and commits mass suicide by drinking cyanide. Among the victims in the massacre are the great-niece of Carlo and Kenneth, and her husband.

The two men had become brothers-in-law when Kenneth’s sister was married to Carlo’s brother; this couple in turn became the parents of a set of twins, Ann and John. Ann’s daughter is among those who drink the poison, and so in a way Carlo’s miracle leads to the destruction of part of his family.

But the ironies extend further. John, the nephew of the two men, travels to Africa with his wife to examine tribal customs among a people who have only recently been proselytized by Catholic priests, including Carlo, and in their fervor to consume the body and blood of communion, the tribe members kill and consume their white visitors. Their death results from a kind of perverse sacrament—a fatally flawed conflation of real and metaphorical consumption. But the mass suicide is also a perverse communion because the celebrants embrace death instead of receiving life everlasting.

Burgess exploits the misunderstanding of church doctrine and sacred ritual to demonstrate how the best intentions can lead to the most disastrous results. In the case of Kenneth, a man who will never procreate because of his sexual orientation, and of Carlo, a man who will never procreate because of his vow of celibacy, their closest chance of seeing their genetic existence survive materially is through their niece and nephew: in a bitter twist of irony, these are the very people who are killed as an unexpected result of good works done in the name of God.

Burgess doubles this twisting of good into evil ends in a parallel example from the life of Kenneth during a section of the novel that examines the rise to power of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Kenneth, a world traveler and bon vivant, happens to be present at a moment when a dying woman (Carlo’s mother, in fact) devoted to saving Germany’s Jews points a gun at Heinrich Himmler. Without thinking—without intending any good deed—Kenneth shoves the Nazi butcher aside and the woman is killed by bodyguards. Kenneth’s action to save a particular life dooms millions of other more remote lives to the gas chambers.

Good and evil are inextricably intertwined in the construction of Burgess’s plot. Kenneth’s witnessing of Carlo’s miracle virtually guarantees the advancement of the canonization, but Carlo’s life-giving miracle itself, and Kenneth’s unthinking preservation of a life, both lead to horrible consequences neither man could have foreseen or would have wanted.

In Kenneth Toomey, Burgess creates a protagonist who is cut off from his family, his religion, and his country by his sexual orientation. In a long and eventful life that covers many of the most exotic and glamorous locations of the world and that coincides with some of the 20th century’s most notorious events and characters, he pursues an elusive goal of personal fulfillment. In the end, he returns to England to live with his sister and is restored to the institutions that had previously shut him out. He achieves reconciliation, and Carlo is likely to achieve canonization, but the novel’s unresolved ethical questions loom larger than either of these men’s lives.

Bibliography
Aggeler, Geoffrey. “Faust in the Labyrinth: Burgess’ Earthly Powers,” Modern Fiction Studies 27, no. 3 (Autumn 1981): 517–531.
Ashley, Leonard R. N. “‘Unhappy All the Time’: Religion in Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers,” Christianity and Literature 52, no. 1 (Autumn 2002): 35–45.