In Earthly Powers Burgess created his masterpiece. At its center are two twentieth-century men who represent different kinds of power—Kenneth Toomey, a past-his-prime author of mediocre fiction, a man who has outlived his contemporaries to survive into, bitter, luxurious old age, living in self-exile on Malta; and Don Carlo Campanati, a man of God, eventually of church revolution and a candidate for sainthood beloved Pope, who rises through the Vatican as a shrewd manipulator to become the architect.

Through the lives of these two modern men Burgess explores the very essence of power in a narrative that spans from Hollywood, to Dublin, Nairobi, Paris, and beyond.