Devils in the Flesh

By R.Z. Sheppard

EARTHLY POWERS by Anthony Burgess; Simon & Schuster; 607 pages; $15.95

Anthony Burgess's versatility is indisputable. He is a novelist, playwright, composer and linguist, as well as a critic whose dissenting views on modern culture have frequently boiled over into newspapers and magazines. But Burgess, 63, is no club Tory grumbling behind his Times and Spectator. He is a rugged, independent Christian humanist who confronts an age that has depersonalized and secularized his values. Such novels as The Doctor Is Sick, Devil of a State and A Clockwork Orange are not only cautionary satires but examples of Burgess's flair for Joycean wordplay and knack for turning out novels that entertain as well as instruct.

Earthly Powers attempts to do both on a large scale. The book is a high entertainment. It is, at 600 pages, also long enough to display Burgess at his best and second best: the penetrating dramatist of culture clash and the clever animater of received wisdom. His new novel stretches from the Edwardian Age through the 1970s. At the halfway mark, the reader has already had brushes with Freud, T.S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Havelock Ellis, Mussolini and Heinrich Himmler.

The pivotal characters are fictional: an aging bestselling novelist named Kenneth Marchal Toomey and Carlo Campanati, an earthy Italian priest destined to become Pope. Toomey is modeled on W. Somerset Maugham and Campanati is an exuberant exaggeration of Pope John XXIII.

The novel takes the form of Toomey's memoirs related in ripe old age. His first line is meant to be a grabber: "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." The cleric wants to discuss K.M.T.'s role in the canonization of Campanati, the recently deceased "Pope Gregory XVII." Many years before in Chicago, Toomey had witnessed Campanati's miraculous healing of a child dying from meningitis.

Famous author and future Pope also share family ties; Toomey's sister was once married to Campanati's brother. French, English, Italian and American blood mix in this distended family saga. Blood also flows in the trenches of World War I, the alleys of Prohibition Chicago, the death camps of Nazi Germany, the bush of contemporary revolutionary Africa and in a

Jonestown-like encampment in the U.S.

Mostly, Toomey observes from the side lines. He is supported by an endless gusher of royalties and protected by his international reputation. Sadly, ironically, he watches as Western civilization slides into barbarism and banality. He is in Germany during the '30s as the Nazis twist science into racist doctrine. In postwar Hollywood he endures producers who change his King Arthur script from a heroic Christian epic to a cheap romance. Toomey is a lonely paradox: lacking an abiding spiritual faith, he can enjoy but not fully possess the material world.

In contrast, Carlo Campanati, saver of souls, relishes his physical existence.

He is gluttonous, shrewd and tough, Believing that evil is an outside job, not part of mankind's nature, he has no compunctions about literally beating the Devil out of people. He bashes a madman with a crucifix, throws "holy" ammonia water in the eyes of an attacker, and makes Hitler abhorrent to a Nazi official through a crude but effective method of behavior modification known as the third degree.

Campanati also finds time to draw blueprints for the ecumenical reform of the church and deliver lectures in basic apologetics to the wayward Toomey. Ideas about good and evil, the spirit and the flesh, are regularly set forth. But Earthly Powers is no Magic Mountain. Having to cover much ground quickly, Burgess shaves his peaks.

His use of historical characters in fictional situations and fictional characters who resemble historical figures requires a more imaginative framework than the slightly chilled memoirs of a wizened literary celebrity. Burgess seems to anticipate such criticism by having Toomey call his recollections "confabulations the replacement of the gaps left by a disordered memory with imaginary remembered experiences believed to be true."

It is typical of Toomey that he explains more than he describes. He can be an amusing and sympathetic guide in this packaged tour de force, but readers who want true literary adventure should turn back to that great confabulator, Charles Kinbote, the deranged scholar-poet of Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire.

-- By R.Z. Sheppard

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