Here’s how to open with a bang. “It was the afternoon of my 81st birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.” That’s the confident, melodious, literate, entertaining first sentence of Earthly Powers, the 1980 novel by Anthony Burgess. Not bad for someone born in 1917. One of the few advantages in choosing authorship as a profession is the faint possibility of a long career, but not everyone manages to keep words and passion alive for the duration. Burgess’s practical attitude to his writing, his detailed understanding of voices, the changing sounds of humanity and the musics and mass cultures they produce all helped to keep his voice on the page young and, in every sense, vital. His outrage in the face of media-sponsored human folly also helped to keep him burning bright. Burgess always both gave and received in his relationship with popular culture.
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