Volume 27, Number 21 & 22 · January 22, 1981
No Holds Barred
By Nigel Dennis
Earthly Powers
by Anthony Burgess
Simon & Schuster, 607 pp., $15.95
This is a most difficult novel to review, not because it is a quarter of a million words long and a good deal shorter in quality, but because it is confusing in its intentions. It begins, for instance, with the narrator, an ancient queer named Toomey, getting kicked in the teeth by his so-called 'secretary,' and the next 100-odd pages see him working his way through three other boyfriends at different stages of his life—language extremely coarse, no holds barred. Not unnaturally—odd as that phrase may seem in such a context—we get the impression that we are reading a grim study of the gay life, and this opinion is supported by various bits of evidence: 1) the word fuck is present on page after page, but there is a complete absence of cunt; 2) tits do appear and even a clitoris, but the former are falsies of a sort and the latter a ghastly blunder (wrong bed, when stoned); 3) only the men are allowed to be naked; 4) all sexual intimacies, including assaults in bars by sailors, exclude the female.
Review, 1785 words
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