Post by jethro on Nov 4, 2024 1:05:58 GMT
Earthly Powers
You know Burgess as the author of A Clockwork Orange. Well apparently he had a long career of novels, short stories, plays, criticism, etc. In the forward–I should learn never to read the forward first; it almost always puts some idea in your head that you spend the whole book refuting–it's revealed that Burgess touted this book to friends as his "Tolstoyan endeavor". Fucking Tolstoy he's not. The thing is long, I'll give him that. He reads more like a British Gore Vidal. Now I like Vidal, for the most part, but Vidal never really wavers off of his point of view as being aloof, flippant, and superior and in the historical context he's always writing in, it creates a satirical voice that you understand as part and parcel to the Gore Vidal experience. In Earthly Powers Burgess tires to pull a similar trick, putting his narrator in the middle of all the major events of the 20th century and having him bumble his gay British way through them. The story line involves a brother-in-law who becomes pope, and ex-lover who goes in for revolutionary African nation building; lots of run ins with James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler, et al. It's all preposterous and fun, but it's like Burgess falls short of making it out and out satire because of a poorly-disguised desire to make the novel 'epic' as hinted at in the forward. A big theme of the book is the narrator's homosexuality and reconciling that with his Catholic upbringing and the social standards of Europe back in the day. All fine and good but ultimately the protagonist just comes off as whiny and limp-wristed. Burgess never really manages to get you to root for the guy. Like I say, the book would've been better as a satire. I think it was sabotaged by the author's desire to be taken seriously.
The best part of the book was the protagonist's cretinous last lover Geoffery, a sodden foul-mouthed lout, "bloody shit fuck cunt you prissy old twat", and all that. Ironically it was the one character that could have come right out of Clockwork Orange. Maybe the old boy was just out of his element trying to write something "Tolstoyan". Dumb ass. Still enjoyable over all.
6/10
You know Burgess as the author of A Clockwork Orange. Well apparently he had a long career of novels, short stories, plays, criticism, etc. In the forward–I should learn never to read the forward first; it almost always puts some idea in your head that you spend the whole book refuting–it's revealed that Burgess touted this book to friends as his "Tolstoyan endeavor". Fucking Tolstoy he's not. The thing is long, I'll give him that. He reads more like a British Gore Vidal. Now I like Vidal, for the most part, but Vidal never really wavers off of his point of view as being aloof, flippant, and superior and in the historical context he's always writing in, it creates a satirical voice that you understand as part and parcel to the Gore Vidal experience. In Earthly Powers Burgess tires to pull a similar trick, putting his narrator in the middle of all the major events of the 20th century and having him bumble his gay British way through them. The story line involves a brother-in-law who becomes pope, and ex-lover who goes in for revolutionary African nation building; lots of run ins with James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler, et al. It's all preposterous and fun, but it's like Burgess falls short of making it out and out satire because of a poorly-disguised desire to make the novel 'epic' as hinted at in the forward. A big theme of the book is the narrator's homosexuality and reconciling that with his Catholic upbringing and the social standards of Europe back in the day. All fine and good but ultimately the protagonist just comes off as whiny and limp-wristed. Burgess never really manages to get you to root for the guy. Like I say, the book would've been better as a satire. I think it was sabotaged by the author's desire to be taken seriously.
The best part of the book was the protagonist's cretinous last lover Geoffery, a sodden foul-mouthed lout, "bloody shit fuck cunt you prissy old twat", and all that. Ironically it was the one character that could have come right out of Clockwork Orange. Maybe the old boy was just out of his element trying to write something "Tolstoyan". Dumb ass. Still enjoyable over all.
6/10
