Go on, let’s have the memorable opening of Earthly Powers again:

It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.

I’ve probably read that line dozens, if not hundreds of times. And now that I’ve read a healthy chunk of the novel, while the situation is every bit as absurd and funny as those opening words suggest, there’s something about it that I had never understood. That first sentence is deliberately balanced not only to provide a striking opening – but to give us the impression of a writer self-consciously striving for that effect.

Five short sentences after that first, the narrator of Earthly Powers lets us know that he “retired twelve years ago from the profession of novelist”. Then he says:

“Nevertheless you will be constrained to consider, if you know my work at all and take the trouble now to reread that first sentence, that I have lost none of my old cunning in the contrivance of what is known as an arresting opening.”

Immediately, everything is thrown into the air. How much of Earthly Powers is contrivance? How much is just writerly fancy and wordplay for the sake of writerly fancy and wordplay? Are some parts of this fiction more real than others? Can we even ask such questions without entangling ourselves in contradictions?

The only certainty – or so it seems at first – is that Kenneth Toomey is a special kind of unreliable narrator. After a short while, I started to believe that the very prose style of the novel is inauthentic, its ticks and proclivities belonging to Kenneth Toomey, rather than Burgess. This suspicion was amplified by frequent reminders that Toomey isn’t a good novelist (certainly not as well respected as Anthony Burgess, anyway). It isn’t just the playful prose, or his habit of indulging in ostentatious obscurities such as “venerean strabismus”. He denigrates his own plays, complains about the reception his books received, and is all too aware that even if his writing has made money, it won’t be remembered beyond his death, even by his “lower middle-class” readers in Camden.

Toomey’s hackery reaches a high point, when he treats us to a prolonged excerpt from his writing. This is a chapter taken, he says, from a book called A Way Back to Eden. The scene, gushing with the “milk of love”, is a comic tour de force:

“Encouraged, Robert gently eased his throbbing burden into the timid heat of the sacred fissure, soothing with gentle words, words of love, while the angelic bell pounded and pulsed without.”

The chapter ends thus:

“And the boy took his lover like a beast, thrusting his empurpled royal greatness into the antrum, without tenderness, with no cooings of love, rather with grunts and howls, his unpared nails drawing blood from breast and belly, and the sky opened for both of them, disclosing in blinding radiance the lineaments of a benedicent numen.”

What joy it must be to be able to write about “throbbing burdens” and “empurpled royal greatness” and get away with it. Burgess knows that no one will take Toomey’s writing too seriously – and as the writer behind the writer, he himself, will be taken very seriously. But few others could go so expertly over the top.

In the next chapter, Burgess provides a critique of A Way Back to Eden, courtesy of Ford Madox Ford, one of the finest literary critics of all time (among other things). “Benedicent numen my arse,” Ford pronounces, and slates all of Toomey’s other writing (and all commercial writing along the way) by saying that the price you have to pay of a “largish readership” is “cliche, halftruth, compromise and timidity”.

In another scene, Burgess (or Toomey) describes some writers meeting in 1920s Paris with deliberate insouciance: “Ezra Pound was, I think, dancing with Sylvia Beach, or it may have been Adrienne Monnier. And you may as well have Ernest Hemingway shadowboxing his way around the periphery.” This is a possibly fictitious scene about fiction writers, which has been written by another fiction writer, who also appears in the scene, where he discusses his own fiction.

Yet even as Burgess blasts through the fourth wall, he builds it up again. The meta-fictional flourishes are quickly set aside for solid physical descriptions of the setting, and sharp pen portraits of Ford’s wheezing and halitosis. You can taste Toomey’s bitterness in the prose. When he writes, “‘Better,’ Ford blasted at me with his breath”, there is anger behind it.

But the cleverest trick in this clever book is the storytelling itself. It’s gripping. It feels real and solid. There’s emotional weight. There’s drama and pathos. At its heart, Earthly Powers remains an immersive and compelling page-turner. Burgess may constantly remind us not to take things at face value – but he also ensures that we can’t help but do so. And call me a lower middle-class Camden Towner, but I can’t help but believe it, and love it.