Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers was a great baggy monster of a novel which should perhaps have won the Booker Prize in 1980, but was beaten by a short head by William Golding’s less ambitious Rites of Passage.
Burgess was carelessly prolific, but Earthly Powers was his bid to write a masterpiece, and its failure even to win the Booker confirmed him in his somewhat resentful belief that the literary establishment regarded him as an interloper: a northerner, graduate of Manchester University rather than Oxford or Cambridge, and a writer who was both careless and over-productive – a bit of a hack, in fact.
