Earthly powers

This for me has distinct parallels with William S Burroughs' "The Western Lands," which appeared just a few years later. Ageing author, obsessed with systems of belief and control, and who has written such mountains of experimental stuff in his past, writes a long, flat-out and relatively conventional novel in which he stuffs in (ooer, missis) everything that has obsessed him.

EP is a history of the twentieth century from someone who watched it all unfold, but admits that he is making much of it up; a vapid, mean-souled individual who is also gay (I felt AB was careful to separate his unpleasant character from his homosexuality, thus avoiding accusations of homophobia). A family saga where the family is both powerful and dysfunctional; the protagonist really isn't Ken Toomey, it's Carlo Campanati, 'shaman and showman', an energetic and proactive Catholic who makes it to Pope, against a dark background (the French title is "La Puissance des Tenebres," 'The power of the shadows') in which the Devil is real - or at least he is in Toomey's (somewhat addled) mind.

Perhaps the most satisfying section of the book is the bit set in Malaysia, where Ken Toomey encounters a malevolent local who clearly has a hotline to something he shouldn't.
Which oddly makes this a novel of the supernatural. This is a world where the Devil does really, genuinely take people over; and that being the case, surely our reaction has to be different to our reaction in a world where some people are just plain bad.
To which end, EP draws in the Nazis, and a fictionalised account of the Jonestown massacre - although what AB describes is closer to the Waco Siege ... which hadn't happened when he wrote it. (I'm sure Burgess would have been delighted with my typo of "Branch Dravidians".) *although I now find that the similarity may be between Burgess' description and something I wrote in about 1992, i.e. still before Waco, which increased the 'siege' element of it. The Branch Davidians, e.g., didn't commit mass suicide.

There's a lot of it, and even trying to write about it gives me indigestion mainly because Ken Toomey (aka fictionalised W Somerset Maugham) is such a disagreeable man. Although so are most of his other characters - the only real exception being Carlo's brother who Toomey of course hates and who seems ok. The women are equally spiteful and nasty - I could accuse AB of hating women, but in that case he presumably hates men as well. I find this a theme in his books, like a shortcut to making an interesting character is to make them an unmitigated asshole. Possibly things like 'American Psycho' are a sendup of this tendency - as DFW once said, Brett Easton Ellis only writes shallow mean characters because that's all he can do.
Which is a shame. Cut him out of the narrative and it'd be fine. Down frorm four stars to three for that reason.