Mr. Burgess, who has in "Earthly Powers" made a remarkable recovery from a series of indifferent fictions that began with "MF," chooses to write entirely from the point of view of an octogenarian homosexual….

To be sure, the heterosexuals in "Earthly Powers" fare almost as poorly as the homosexuals, once Mr. Burgess punches the total bar on his adding machine, but the homosexuals range from the opportunistic to the nasty and seem, in the scheme of the novel, to deserve their misery.

As if this moralizing were not sufficiently scandalous, Mr. Burgess invents a twin moon for Toomey, Don Carlo Campanati, a fat priest and exorcist who becomes the people's Pope. Carlo, with the changes he proposes to the Mother Church, sounds suspiciously like Pope John XXIII, except that he may himself be an agent of diabolism. The moons of Toomey and Carlo, in perfect opposition, orbit around...