This is a big book with many big virtues, and one big (we might say) structural flaw. But whatever else it is, Earthly Powers is an extraordinarily sustained exercise in imaginative and stylistic vitality. It probably is what many have claimed it as: Burgess's masterpiece.
In You've Had Your Time he describes its gestation, prompted by the urge to write a novel that would 'really show what I would do'. His subject: an 81-year old novelist living the high life in Malta on his global commercial success, looking back over his well-traveled life and thereby providing a sort of panoptic individual history of the twentieth-century. 'He celebrates his eighty-first birthday in the first chapter,' Burgess says. 'Let then the total of chapters be eighty-one':
81 is 3 x 3 x 3 x 3. I spelt this out at the beginning. "I looked at the gilt Maltese clock on the wall of the stairwell. It said nearly three ... We were three steps from the bottom ... I minced the three treads down the hall ... Three steps away ... lay a fresh batch of felicitations brought by Cable and Wireless motor cyclists." [YHYT, 356]And so on. Actually the book has 82 chapters, an error Burgess claims only to have noticed at the proof stage. This seems to me unlikely, and I'll come back to it. The relationship between design and the creative sprawl that exceeds design is, in one sense, the whole point of Earthly Powers, and this little anecdote about the composition is almost too apropos. All those 3s: this foresquare Trinitarian masonry, and its more shadowy implications (3+3, 3+3 ... two thirds of the beast's 66(6) number) are at play throughout the whole book. But what about the one big 'structural flaw' I'm arguing is present?
This extensive structure has at its core a mere anecdote. A pope is to be canonised. The Vatican needs evidence of saintliness—a miracle, for instance. When he was a mere priest, the pope cured a child of terminal meningitis through the power of prayer. This child grows up to be a sort of James Jones, the leader of a religious sect who orders his followers to commit suicide. God, permitting the miracle, clearly intended its beneficiary to perform an act of great evil. Free will does not come into it, since a disease has free will and its lethal progress has been reversed. If the child had died he would not have caused the deaths of the others. What curious game is God playing? If God is also the devil, the prince of the powers of the air, then it is as likely that evil will come out of good as the other way around. Perhaps more so. If our century is to be explained at all, it is in terms of God becoming his opposite. [YHYT, 356]I'm assuming that '...since a disease has free will' is a typo for '... since a disease has no free will' (either that, or AB is folding a very peculiar view of free will into this summary). Now, the apparent theological paradox he identifies is a fascinating hook for a story, but a hook is something from which a story should depend. Burgess instead treats it as a denouement, or climax. That's a structural misjudgment, I think.
That the priest, Don Carlo Campanati, cured the boy is dropped in early on; it's what the boy goes on to do that is withheld. The novel opens with the Archbishop of Malta visiting the elderly narrator, Kenneth Marchal Toomey, in his house, providing the pretext for the novel's desperately famous opening 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. [EP, 7]It's certainly a good line, though I wonder if its Book-of-Quotations fame has come to overshadow even the novel it introduces. Anyway, the Archbishop asks him because Toomey was friends with Don Carlo back when he was a simple priest; and because, moreover, Carlo's brother Domenico married Toomey's sister Hortense, making the two men brothers after a fashion. The request sends Toomey back on a lengthy, detailed and vastly entertaining reminiscence of his entire life, from English respectability in the early years of the century, Toomey's wrestling to bring his own homosexuality and his Catholic upbringing into alignment and having to jettison the latter, through the first world war, the flu pandemic (which claims the life of Toomey's first love), success as a novelist, playwright and librettist for comic musicals, life entre deux guerres on the Continent, witnessing the rise of Italian Fascism and German Nazism first hand. Toomey meets just about every famous name in literature and politics you can think of, and the whole thing is very sharply told, witty, thoughtful and believable. Possibly the scenes in Nazi Germany (where, amongst other things, Toomey accidentally saves the life of Heinrich Himmler) go on a little too long. But the book as a whole moves with such pace and energy that you begrudge it nothing. The narrator's life is based on Somerset Maugham. 'I saw myself in the washstand mirror, the writer at thirty-three, with [my] mother's eyes, though mine closer set and overwatchful, the brow, creased a little ... the strawy hair sleek with Clovis brilliantine, the guardsman's moustache' [EP, 196]
His early successes on stage and in the novel mirror Maugham's (as does his later fame, fondness for international travel and tendency to fall for the wrong sort of man). But early on, and remembering that Earthly Powers is also a comic novel, Burgess mixes in a little bit of a very different writer:
Young Toomey is persuaded to write the lyrics to a comic musical, the rather fun sounding Say It, Cecil: when Cecil tries to declare his love to Cecilia bad things happen: 'in August 1914 he said I love you to a girl and immediately war breaks out. In France he said je t'aime to a girl and the surrounding village was blasted to smithereens ... [he tried] ya vas lublu and this brought about the Russian Revolution ... He says Ich liebe dich, despite the snarls of the patriotic, and this brings about the collapse of Germany, but he still dare not say I love you' [EP, 90]. This is a huge hit, as we can well believe; and like Plum Toomey goes on to have great success in musical theatre. Also like Plum he is interned by the Germans during the second world war and persuaded to make treacherous broadcasts, although unlike Wodehouse Toomey has the Burgessian wit to encode his speeches with acrostics mocking the Nazis and so escapes postwar sanction by the British authorities.
After the war Toomey watches his sister's marriage break down and his brother-in-law's clerical career go from strength to strength. On a lecture tour of the USA he interviews Godfrey Manning, the charismatic leader of a religious cult based in the Mojave. Only after this cult implodes in its Jonestown-style mass suicide does Burgess reveal, with a rabbit-from-the-hat flourish, that Godfrey Manning was the kid miraculously saved by the young Don Carlo. It would have been better to frontload this revelation, and let the novel spool out under its own momentum—momentum it possesses, after all, in spades.
My gripe is that structuring the novel the way Burgess does amounts to an (unsuccessful, I think) attempt to give it the epistemological potency of deeper mystery, in the Oedpius Rex or Great Expectations sense. Since it doesn't really pull this off (again: I'm only talking structurally here) what we actually get is a slightly shaggy-dog-story vibe, with the last chunk of the book frankly anticlimactic. Don Carlo gets elected Pope, but there seems little he can do with the role and he soon dies. Toomey himself ends the novel living with his elderly sister on the Sussex coast, the last chapter designedly downbeat.
But, look: I don't want to give the impression that this book doesn't work. It does work, and splendidly. It is, in point fact, one of the half dozen English novels of the 20th-century that really deserve to be called masterpieces. I stress this, in a rather clod-hopping way here, because I'm aware that the odour of also ran-ness adheres to it, at least in some quarters. This has a lot to do with the fact that it failed to win the 1980 Booker Prize, such that the work has almost become known as 'the Booker-losing Earthly Powers'. One of the judges, Claire Tomalin, recently gave us an insider's perspective on that famous dust-up:
I was determined that Alice Monroe’s The Beggar Maid should be on the short-list. I didn’t expect it to win, but I knew it should be there. So I dug in my heels and after some hard bargaining it went on. But the big contenders for the Booker in 1980 were, by general consent, Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers, a huge, ungainly, careless book full of life and energy; and William Golding’s Rites of Passage, a finely constructed work by an established master, but with something slightly stale about it—I even wondered whether he had written it some years earlier and left it in a drawer. The night before our final meeting I lay awake telling myself I must decide between these two. But in the morning [chair of judges, David] Daiches began by dismissing the Burgess as one that needed no further consideration—it simply wouldn’t do. I then made a pitch for it, for its range and vitality, for the way Burgess applied his imagination to the world we were living in, for his heroic powers to entertain. At the end of my speech I saw that not one of my fellow judges agreed with me. Seeing that the Burgess was out, knowing that the other judges had only just consented to Munro being on the short list, I gave my vote to Golding. [Claire Tomalin, Several Strangers: Writing from Three Decades (Penguin 2000)]The main take-away from this, I think, is that Daiches was evidently a dick. Golding wrote some great novels, but the ponderous Rites of Passage is not one of them. Tomalin's spot-on about the staleness of it (and I'd agree with all but one of her descriptors for Earthly Powers: yes to a huge, ungainly and full of life and energy; no to careless). When Toomey meets Joyce he meditates briefly on writers who 'don't like movement' and who therefore produce 'novels as still life or sculpture ... massive arias with a lot of ornamentation' [EP, 195]. Golding is one of those sorts of novelists, I think. Rites of Passage is an inert novel, a long extrapolation of social class as a fixity, an existential donné to which characters measure their maturity by the degree of nuance of their accommodation. This is because Golding, here and elsewhere in his writing, really does believe that class, hierarchy and status are our only bulwarks against the essential savagery of human nature. Burgess, on the other hand, is preeminently a writer of motion, movement, restlessness and flow. What really seals the deal, Earthly Powers/Rites of Passage comparison-wise, is the gay thing, about to become (in the 1980s) one of the main foci for civil and human rights campaigning, the eventual acceptance of which would mark a great change in Western social life. Golding's novel presents its single homosexual act as unambiguously shameful and debasing. The narrator, pompous young aristocrat, Edmund Talbot, looks down upon the obsequious Reverend Colley as his social inferior; poor old Colley, bullied, miserable and drunk, performs fellatio on one of the sailors. When news of his act passes around the ship he retreats to his cabin and wills himself to die. Earthly Powers, on the other hand, looks forward rather than back in its detailed, no-holds-barred and impressively varied portrait of the gay world of its narrator.
Burgess, suspecting he had not won, refused to attend the Booker ceremony on the presumably spurious grounds that he did not possess a dinner jacket. His account in You've Had Your Time of the snub (for snub it surely was: Earthly Powers clearly should have won) is tartly snide: he claims to have 'heard vaguely' of the Booker Prize, but asked by the press at the time how he felt about being shortlisted he claims: 'I felt nothing.' When he adds 'gifts of money are always acceptable, but I would rather received them from unknown admirers, not from contentious committees' [YHYT, 365] you realize he's taking the piss. Can't say I blame him.
The snubbing was incident to a literary snobbery that has aged especially badly. 1980 was neither the first nor the last time bad books would win the Man Booker over the back of much better books, but 1980 was the last year of what we might call the 'old', crusty backward-looking Booker. 1981 was the year Midnight's Children won, a book exactly as huge, ungainly, full of life and energy (and also a little careless, I think) as Burgess's was. After that the prize opened itself to post-colonial and un-English voices, and its hit rate improved.
Snobbery, of course, can be triggered by several different things, and it may be that provocations other than Burgess's Catholic Northern working-class nature have brought out the snob in some readers. For instance, Earthly Powers's very calculated heterogeneity might put a reader off, leaving her uncertain from chapter to chapter what sort of book she is reading. The narrator is unreliable and makes many errors (deliberately inserted by AB), which rubbed some reviewers up the wrong way. Tonally the comic and the pitiful, the dignified and the Rabelaisian, cheek and jowl rub along. Some people don't like that, prefer to have their mashed potato completely separated from their neat pile of peas and neither intruding on the space occupied by their pork chops. Earthly Powers manages what might look like an oxymoron: it is a tightly sprawling work, I mean 'Sprawl' in a particular aesthetic sense, the Les Murray sense; and the tightness has to do with order at work stifling energy as much as it has chaos undermining the harmony of order. God and the Devil is Burgess's way of it.
That's the nub, I think. There are several ways in which this novel gleefully resists categorisation, but the main one has to do with the crashing together of a detailed quasi-realist texture of fictive verisimilitude on the one hand, and the Gothic horror of actual devils on the other. The intrusion of this latter into that former is the most startling formal risk Earthly Powers takes, I'd say. Burgess's Toomey's evocation of life in Modernist Europe, hobnobbing with Eliot and Joyce, Hesse and Freud, is so compelling the actual voodoo that actually curses and kills the love of Toomey's life in Malaysia feels like a scene from a completely different novel. Modernity is supposed to have replaced all that with, if not a rational disbelief then at least a shift from literal credence to mythic and metaphorical engagement. Once upon a time, Milton's Satan properly scared readers, as a piece of actual biography, an account of a real and terrifying individual. Now he occupies the same cultural-imaginative space as Tolkien's Sauron. Nobody gets actually scared by Paradise Lost nowadays. We don't get actually scared by Tolkien either, but the difference is that, with the later work, we're not supposed to.
What makes Earthly Powers so compelling, I think, over and above its bravura and sustained brilliance as a piece of readable fiction, is Burgess's simple refusal to concede disenchantment to modernity. It reminds me of something J G Ballard once said, in similarly against-the-grain mode: 'modernism is the Gothic of the information age'. Toomey, the motile, jet-setting, film-script writing, TV interviewee, represents some of Burgess's own experience of what it means to be an author in the information age. Yet the Toomey who, at the novel's beginning, is rebuking the Archbishop of Malta for his beliefs in miracles ('The world was once all miracle. Then everything started to be explained. Everything will be explained in time. It's just a matter of waiting' [EP, 17]) writes his own life as modern memoir interpenetrated with the radically inexplicable. The key to grasping what the novel is really doing, I'd say, is reading it not as a mainstream 'literary' blockbuster, nor even as the all-bells-and-whistles version of a Judith Krantz or Mario Puzo book that Burgess, syly, liked to suggest it was. Rather we should read it as a ghost story, a Gothic novel, a Fantasia about a porous self wandering through a buffered world. I'll explain what I mean
It's not wrong to call Earthly Powers a book about evil, but we can be more precise: it is a book about the Devil. Burgess called Pope John XXIII, on whom Campanati/Pope Gregory is modeled, 'a Pelagian heretic and an emissary of the Devil' [Biswell's, Real Life of Anthony Burgess (Picador 2005), 373], largely because of the Second Vatican Council, which Burgess thought a Very Bad Thing. That's strong language, especially from a man no longer a communicant of the Church. But let's take it as a fictive exaggeration rather than an earnest vehemence. In Earthly Powers Campanati is portrayed as a man with capacious appetites (food, drink, gambling) and perfectly lacking in doubt. His unshakeable faith and his many good works make him an almost exemplary priest, but he is also liable to stand-by whilst people suffer. In one memorable scene Campanati allows Nazis to torture a young girl in front of him (a grisly Marathon Man-style dental torture: there's a good deal to do with teeth in this novel actually) rather than tell them where a certain resistance group is to be found. He claims not to know, but actually he does. Campanati has a fundamentalist approach to faith. In one key Burgessian sense, he is an innocent: real-world uncertainty has never debauched his certitude. As in his other novels, Burgess has a properly conflicted attitude to innocence as something simultaneously beautiful and terrifying.
Is he the Devil, though? To put it a little more precisely: the novel's thesis, as Burgess summary quoted at the top of this blogpost suggests, is that God and the Devil are in some sense the same entity ('Jesus Beelzebub!' swears Geoffrey, Toomey's venal young catamite [49]). The numerically significant 27th chapter (a trinity of trinities, 3 x 3 x 3) is given over to one of Campanati's sermons about the real presence of the Devil in the world:
When I use that word evil, I do not do so in the way of the politician or the journalist. For they use it loosely and vaguely, as a mere synonym for painful or undesirable ... But mal, male, evil properly means an absolute force that has run riot in the world almost since the day of its creation and will only be quelled on the Day of Judgement. This force, being absolute, is not manmade. It is the monopoly of spiritual beings, creatures of God, high and majestic and beautiful servants of the Almighty who, under a leader, the most beautiful of them all, one whose name was Bringer of Light, rejected God's dominion, declined to serve, and were thrown from the empyrean into dark and empty space. [EP, 164]Toomey gives voice to an alternate interpretation of the wickednesses of the world. For him it proceeds from us, it's part of our nature, not something external and diabolically embodied. He tours the recently liberated camp at Buchenwald and sees many of the horrors of that horrible place. He finds the stench of the place 'all too human, no effluvium from diabolic sources.'
I looked at the sky, rainwashed, pure, and saw an elongated pink cloud like a Picasso angel with trumpet. The prince of the power of the air. No. This was no Luciferan work. The intellectual rebel against God could not stoop to it. This was pure man, pure me. ... Man had not been tainted from without by the prince of the power of the air. The evil was all in him and he was beyond hope of redemption. [EP, 457]The Prince of the Power of the Air was Burgess's preferred title for the novel, vetoed by his publisher. But the thing to bear in mind is: whatever Toomey-the-narrator says here, Toomey's own narration absolutely believes in real devils. It's not possible to read chapter 38, in which Carlo performs an exorcism on Toomey's ailing partner in Malaysia, and come to any other conclusion. The book is a Gothic demonstory hidden inside a spacious Modern history of our times.
Here's a thing. Write out 'Don Carlo Campanati' in Greek, notating the 'c's (a letter not present in the Greek alphabet) as 'κ's, and representing the Italianate terminal 'i' with the phonically equivalent but more properly Greek terminal η: Δον Καλό Kαμπανατη. Two interesting things happen. One is that the name reveals itself as a juxtaposition of καλός ('good, noble, beautiful, virtuous'; καλό is the accusative singular) with a derivative of καμπύλος, 'bent, crooked, curved', which is a nicely equivocal name for this man of God who is also, in some complicated way, the Devil. ('Jesus Beelzebub!') And if we add up the numerical values of the letters that comprise the name Δον Καλό Kαμπανατη (you'll find the table of Greek alphanumerics here) it comes to 666. The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed I've dropped a rho out of 'Carlo', since Greek does not lengthen its vowels by following them with an 'r' the way some other European languages do, and to preserve the connection to καλός. This might strike you as a cheat, but if it does I invite you either to consider whether its the sort of shift Burgess himself was likely to use, or else to add-in the extra 'ρ' (= 100) and ponder whether this, by converting the bestial 666 to 766 doesn't, by stepping the number up to the holy '7', enact something perfectly consonant with the novel's thesis that God and the devil are, somehow, superposed. More to the point, this superogatory insertion, like Burgess pretending surprise that writing a book with 3 x 3 x 3 x 3 chapters actually results in a book with (3 x 3 x 3 x 3) + 1 chapters, mediates the central force of the whole novel. I mean: that there is always something left over, something more than can be deduced by reason, some dangerous or miraculous supplement.
Of course this is fanciful, but its also exactly the sort of game Burgess liked playing in his own writing. We can add to it that 'Kenneth Marchal Toomey' (provided we're ready to accept that 'th' and 'ch' are both two-character rebuses for single Greek letters, 'θ' and 'χ' respectively) is a three part name—Kεννεθ Mαρχαλ Tooμεη—each element of which has six letters.* '666' crops up variously scattered through the text: one example to stand in for a weary taxonomy of all, Toomey's lecture tour of the States, the one on which he takes time off to meet Godfrey Manning, leader of the 'Children of God' cult who eventually murder 2000 of their own people, is organised by 'ACM (American Circuit Management), 666 Avenue of the Americas' [EP, 553].
Perhaps we can agree to disagree, you and I, over whether Earthly Powers posits actual external devils or wants us to read the evil it catalogues (from war to influenza epidemics, from the Holocaust and Jonestown massacres to countless individual acts of cruelty, selfishness, violence and abandonment) as the expression of the truth of human nature. A better way is to go back to the distinction I mentioned earlier, between the porous and buffered selves.
The distinction comes from Charles Taylor's big book A Secular Age (2007), and I'm thinking in particular of an excellent essay by Alan Jacobs called 'Fantasy and the Buffered Self' [The New Atlantis 41 (2014), 3-18] that unpacks some of the implications of Taylor's idea. Really the whole essay is worth reading, but I'm going to pull out a few bits. Here's Taylor on the porous/buffered distinction:
Almost everyone can agree that one of the big differences between us and our ancestors of five hundred years ago is that they lived in an “enchanted” world, and we do not; at the very least, we live in a much less “enchanted” world. We might think of this as our having “lost” a number of beliefs and the practices which they made possible. But more, the enchanted world was one in which these forces could cross a porous boundary and shape our lives, psychic and physical. One of the big differences between us and them is that we live with a much firmer sense of the boundary between self and other. We are “buffered” selves. We have changed.And here is Jacobs' persuasive gloss on the idea:
To put that shift in simple terms, a person accepts a buffered condition as a means of being protected from the demonic or otherwise ominous forces that in pre-modern times generated a quavering network of terrors. To be a pre-modern person, in Taylor’s account, is to be constantly in danger of being invaded or overcome by demons or fairies or nameless terrors of the dark — of being possessed and transformed, or spirited away and never returned to home and family. Keith Thomas’s magisterial Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) specifies many of these dangers, along with the whole panoply of prayers, rites, amulets, potions, chants, spells, and the like, by which a person might seek protection from the otherwise irresistible. It is easy, then, to imagine why a person — or a whole culture — might, if it could, exchange this model of a self with highly permeable boundaries for one in which the self feels better protected, defended — impermeable, or nearly so.I quote this at length because it seems to me so interesting. Jacobs' thesis is that a kind of yearning back to porosity, and its attendant enchantments, is behind the great contemporary vogue for Fantasy:
The problem with this apparently straightforward transaction is that the porous self is open to the divine as well as to the demonic, while the buffered self is closed to both alike. Those who must guard against capture by fairies are necessarily and by the same token receptive to mystical experiences. The “showings” manifested to Julian of Norwich depend upon exceptional sensitivity, which is to say porosity — vulnerability to incursions of the supernatural. The portals of the self cannot be closed on one side only. But the achievement of a safely buffered personhood — closed off from both the divine and the demonic — is soon enough accompanied by a deeply felt change in the very cosmos. As C. S. Lewis notes in The Discarded Image (1964), the medieval person who found himself “looking up at a world lighted, warmed, and resonant with music” gives way to the modern person who perceives only emptiness and silence. Safety is purchased at the high price of isolation, as we see as early as Pascal, who famously wrote of the night sky, “Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie” (“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me”).
Might it not be possible to experience the benefits, while avoiding the costs, of both the porous and the buffered self? I want to argue here that it is precisely this desire that accounts for the rise to cultural prominence, in late modernity, of the artistic genre of fantasy. Fantasy — in books, films, television shows, and indeed in all imaginable media — is an instrument by which the late modern self strives to avail itself of the unpredictable excitements of the porous self while retaining its protective buffers. Fantasy, in most of its recent forms, may best be understood as a technologically enabled, and therefore safe, simulacrum of the pre-modern porous self.Now, interested though I am in Fantasy as a mode, I'm not suggesting that Earthly Powers is well described by that term. What I'm trying to argue is something more radical: that Burgess wants, in effect, to reverse the polarity of this recuperation of porosity and buffer-retention. His novel is a detailed, compelling account of buffered modern life; his protagonist and narrator somebody shielded by his wit and cynicism, not to mention his money and connections, from feeling anything too strongly. Moments like his dark epiphany at Buchenwald, and the death of his truest (though Platonic) love, Philip naturally pierce his screen. Living with Taylorised buffers doesn't protect us from normal human grief, despair or horror, of course. The buffering isn't supposed to do that; it's supposed to keep out a different, more destabilising set of uncanninesses. And it is precisely this unnervingly unheimlich quality that Earthly Powers disposes into the interstices of its modern narrative. It would have been enough (Dayenu!) for Burgess to have exposed his civilised, spiritually cocooned protagonist to the horrors of the Holocaust, had the point merely have been one about 'evil' in the political or journalistic sense of the word. Burgess does more than this precisely because he wants to portray a porous mind in a buffered age, or more precisely a mind wrestling with its own porosity, in denial about it, and yet unable to seal itself away. At the novel's beginning the mere word faithful is enough to bring tears to Toomey's eyes: a word he had once used to Geoffrey, his brattish young lover, 'weeping' although it is 'no more than a camp joke to Geoffrey's generation' [EP, 8]. As the novel gets going we'll tend to believe, not least because Toomey-narrator invites us to believe, that this sensitivity indexes nothing more than an old man's fall into fatuous sentimentality: 'Home. Another one of those damned emotive words. I must give up seeing people, I told myself, sniffing the tears back. All the old bitch can do these days is lay on the weepy weepies. Selfpity, you know' [EP, 33]. It's not that, though. It's a sense, as Toomey puts it later in the book, that 'Religion is the most dangerous thing in the world' ('It is not little girls in their communion frocks and silly holy pictures and the Children of Mary. It is highly explosive, dynamite, the splitting of the atom' [EP, 349]); and dangerous because the true currency of Catholicism is the opening of one's soul to the enchantments and terrors of the old world. The same thing that might provoke a highly intelligent lapsed Catholic to revert to sudden wrath when the Church to which he no longer belongs changes the language in which it celebrates the mass which he no longer attends. A Pope who would do such a thing must be the Devil's emissary! And, written up in fictional form, the emissary drops out of the picture, and 666-Campanati becomes both god and devil himself.
Goodreads reviews reveal a marmite book that absolutely divides readers. Some love it immoderately, some despise it with scorn. I'd suggest that what is so superb, or despicable, about this book, depending, is the way it refuses to buffer its vision of the evils of the world. It really is a devil of a book: a masterpiece, a marvel.
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* Toomey is a strange name, though, isn't it? Its sepulchral sound is perhaps more distraction than anything else; unless Burgess has in mind the Scots phrase 'Toom Tabard', meaning an empty coat, which is to say a shallow or vacuous person. Me, I have a more fanciful theory: I think Burgess is thinking of the Greek τό ὀμμα ('to-ommə'), 'the eye', an 'I Am A Camera'-stylee moniker appropriate for a first-person narrator of such observational perceptiveness (of a private detective who discovers him in flagrante with his lover Rodney: 'he seemed to have dyed his hair some time past; the dye was working out and there were patches of dirty grey and dead black and a residual henna glow' [EP, 93]) and its intrinsic unreliability. But I'm digressing.
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