Endorsements

Enter Enderby, his old quirky self, feeding on cream cakes and sausages and fighting his dyspepsia with a mysterious black draught from his Chinese pharmacist, lecturing on (imaginary) Elizabethan dramatists while berating his students for their slothful ignorance, disrupting the dismal routine of late-night talk shows and working on his epic poem (at his desk, not on his toilet as of old) based on the life of the heretic Pelagius. And exit Enderby (alas), ambushed by his bad heart in alien, malevolent New York. Hollywood has twisted his idea for a film based on Gerard Manley Hopkins's The Wreck of the Deutschland into a movie that surpasses even A Clockwork Orange as a horrorshow extravaganza. Enderby himself is the subject of attack on all sides, by college students, subway muggers, and press pundits. And finally - fatally - the woman from Poughkeepsie who shows up late one night with copies of his books, a gun, and a grievance. Enderby, the 'desperately innocent observer' of Anthony Burgess's Inside Mr Enderby and Enderby Outside, is on his last, valiant, buckling legs, lunging away at New York - and all American culture - in a last-ditch defence of Art, Original Sin, and Proper Nourishment.