Enderby is a delightful character. I'd actually forgotten all about him until landing on goodreads and starting to think seriously about what good books I've read over the years.

If you like A Hitchhiker's Guide, The Importance of Being Earnest,Bucket of Face, A Confederacy of Dunces, or any of PG Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster/Jeeves novels, I can confidently recommend Enderby.

You'll find a bit of Charles, Ignatius, Jack,and Bertie in Enderby. And you'll love all the secondary characters, too. Enderby is plagued by his own Marvin, Jeeves, Algy, and Myrna, too.

When life truly gets you down and you need something absolutely delightful to pull you up, step inside Enderby's life! (And if you do, please let me know which scene you liked the best!) I can promise you'll never feel quite the same about a cup of English Breakfast again.

Now that I've remembered him again, I'm going to order this collection --- and gasp --- pay fullprice for it --- unless I can grab it cheap before Border's closes shop. I just hope I can get it before this weekend. A bottle of cold wine and several hundred pages of excellent absurdity! Let it rain, let it rain, let it rain.

There is no doubt that Burgess can write but he didn't manage to engage me. Enderby oscillates between generating sympathy to downright horror due to his lack of sensitivity. Burgess is a wordsmith by today's standards so I enjoyed expanding my vocabulary, but the philosophical asides didn't add to the story. Let's face it that a 'professional poet' is going to have his problems, regardless of skill. Maybe I would treat him more differently depending on what I last read. There are just too many books out there.

Very funny. The involuntary adventures of a poet who would much prefer to be left alone. The stories become more and more fantastic and 'over the top' as do the locations: from Brighton to London, Rome to Spain, Tangier, Indiana and outer space to a version of earth in a different universe.

Poetic farty, anti-hero Enderby is a balding, anti-society lonely man. He is a well regarded poet but a poorly regarded human being. He is written to be a loveable, sympathetic character.

The complete edition covers his route to a failed, unconsummated marriage to Vesta (1966) then his escape after being framed for shooting her musical protégé to Morocco but seeking revenge on a anti-friend competitor poet (1968). His final day as a teacher in America forms the third novel (1978) then a form of parallel universe allows Enderby to be invited to write the lyrics for a musical and he falls for the black lead actress (1984).

This is all well written with Anthony's erudite linguistic abilities. It can get all too indulgent of the author in my view and with increasing demoralisation I progressed with a declining level of enjoying each book with the sense that the author was progressively having greater fun writing. The first two are most definitely the best, not comic or funny but just rather humorous on infrequent occasions.

If I had known I'd have not started the 'complete version' (I can't not finish a book in one go) but just bought 'Inside Mr Enderby' and I'd have probably left it there.

As you'd expect from a collection of four novels written over a period of twenty years or more, this is uneven. The first two novels hand together quite well. In the first, Enderby tries to avoid engaging with the outside world; in the second, he is forced to do so. As with anything by Burgess, it's funny, wordy, and vocabulary-expanding. Enderby himself is a very ambiguous fellow. He's a truly horrific human being, but also strangely appealing to anyone who has elitist/artistic tendencies.

The last two novels are a different matter. They don't hang together, either with each other or with the first two. The Clockwork Testament is the worst novel of the four, in terms of art (less well written, less unified) and morality (most contemporary readers will judge at least Enderby and possibly also Burgess to be racist) but also the most interesting in terms of literary history and philosophy: it is, quite obviously, a response to the American reception of A Clockwork Orange/i>. This is perfectly reasonable in purely intellectual terms. The novel was butchered by the film version, and Burgess was made to appear someone he really isn't (i.e., the film is a celebration of the individual freedoms so beloved by seventies radicals; the book is actually a rejection of the juvenile antics that bear some resemblance to the antics of seventies radicals); here, Enderby spends much time thinking about Dostoevskian themes of individual freedom, determinism, and predestination, in a fairly responsible manner, i.e., in exactly the manner that the film of ACO, and the aforementioned radicals, refused.

Unfortunately, Burgess lets the radicals themselves into the book, and promptly becomes the kind of reductionist that he claims those radicals were. Racism is mostly in your head, and so is sexism, etc... No, they're not.

The final novel, Enderby's Dark Lady, could almost be an apology for writing the Testament. The 'dark lady' of Shakespeare becomes a wonderful black American woman, who is far more intelligent, beautiful, sensible, and personable than Enderby... and also clearly a victim of blatant sexism and racism, which is not, as it was in the Testament, excused. It's also a very funny piece of anti-Americanism, if you like that kind of thing. And let's be honest, you got to the end of a review of a series of Anthony Burgess novels, so you probably do.

Unfortunately, the last chapter of this last Enderby novel is very, very silly.

A clever and hilarious series is to be found in the Enderby novels. Enderby himself is one of Burgess's finest achievements. A bumbling dyspeptic rude impotent elitist poet whose personal life always seems to fall apart in service to art, for better or for worse, so to speak. He is an outcast, much like Burgess, finding it hard to make a home of anywhere. All he has is his muse and his love of art, and he must betray both to connect with the outside world.

Burgess's key themes make an appearance; Burgess's apostate catholic theology pairs well with scatological humor, ponderings on the worth of poetry, and the occasional quiet moment of honest reflection on the human condition that peer through the witticism and cynicism of Enderby and his peers.

The first two novels are the strongest. Burgess originally imagined them as one novel, but due to a thankfully false prognosis that gave him a year to live, he feared he wouldn't be able to finish it. He released the first half as Inside Mr. Enderby, and Enderby Outside was finished a few years later.

The other two novels are strange entities, largely given life by Enderby himself who I never seemed to tire of. Burgess had things say with these two novels, but it almost seems like he tacked Enderby to it for lack of a better idea. Not that I'm complaining; again, Enderby is worth the ride.

The Clockwork Testament or Enderby's End is a fictional re-creation of Burgess's own experience dealing with the aftermath of Kubrick's adaptation of A Clockwork Orange. Enderby waxes his most elitist here and has a disdain for the social issues of the day, only wishing to stick to his expertise - language. When Kubrick pulled his film from cinemas based on reports that youth who had viewed the film engaged in imitative violence, Burgess felt like Kubrick had betrayed art to censorship. For Burgess, if one film or novel or play could be held responsible for the actions of the viewer, reader, or audience member, then they all could be. Not even Shakespeare would be safe from censorship and public outrage. Enderby clarifies the themes of ACO: original sin, free will, and what-not.

Enderby's Dark Lady seems to be a self-lashing, all too catholic, for his pastiche Shakespearean novel Nothing Like the Sun and perhaps an earlier tendency toward casual racism. However, Dark Lady has some of the most genuinely hilarious sequences of the series. Enderby's impotence and hypocrisy is on full display here, at times comic and others genuine. Again, the latter two novels are far too humorous and human to dismiss.

I would highly recommend reading the first two novels, especially if you enjoy Burgess. The latter two I would recommend as well, but only if the reader has fallen for the title character. He is despicably anti-social, but ineluctable in his honesty. Enderby is a poet. He is never spurious or perfidious, even when he ought to be, and that is his ultimate charm.

Enderby's Dark Lady is worth it alone, still one of the funniest books I've ever read

The sort of book stacked full of lines you wish you'd written. Funn and moving and clever, as you'd expect, only much more so. A book to read lots and lots and still pick up on things you hadn't before, and still laugh out loud too.

Inside Mr. Enderby 4 stars - I thought this was a wonder when I read it in 1997. Burgess is for word lovers. One of the things that makes him funny is his insertion of the perfect overwrought word at the right moment. His gift very much reminds me of Martin Amis's work, though they are strikingly dissimilar in other ways.

Enderby Outside 3 stars - Reading this in 2013, I was disappointed. I lost interest in the narrative toward the middle. And the last scene where Enderby meets his muse I did not like at all. Though technically, there was no falling off of technique. In other words, it doesn't get sloppy, I simply lost interest in it. The reason for this was the discourse on poetry, which hasn't aged well.

I have yet to read the last two novels here: Clockwork Testament and Enderby's Dark Lady.

While I liked the first of the four books contained here I did find myself of necessity having to put it down, but equally eager to take it up again as soon as possible. it is very funny. Burgess likes to pride himself apparently on use of obscure words, but that's a part of what is interesting about him. Enderby seems an extemporizing of his own (Burgess's) personality to a great degree, but he scores in a lot of ways when he skewers trends in pop culture prevalent at the time he was writing it. This one is a great antidote to boredom.

Love Enderby

As someone who alternately imagines himself to be Robin Hood one moment and then a schlemiel, the next, this book appeals to my schlemiel self. And, yet for all those disgusting moments (think of Confederacy of Dunces), where our "hero" warms himself before the electric fire while seat on the throen, he does stumble into some exciting dramas. The world tends to hate him and hunt him, although he is oblivious to their venom.