Inside Mr. Enderby by Anthony Burgess
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Anthony Burgess is mainly known as the author of A Clockwork Orange , which I reviewed here on Goodreads, and which owes a large part of its popularity to the outstanding film adaptation by Stanley Kubrick. While Inside Mr. Enderby (1963) may not convey equally powerful artistic vision, it is still a remarkable novel and, to me, it deserves almost as high a rating.

A truly magnificent chapter opens the novel. Children from the future, on their Educational Time Trip, visit a great poet of the past, a Mr. Enderby, who is sleeping in his rented flat. They explore his body and also his bedroom, kitchen, and - most importantly - his bathroom: this the only place where Mr. Enderby is able to create poetry. The Muse visits him only when he sits on his "poetic seat."

After this remarkable introduction we follow events in Mr. Enderby's life in a relatively linear fashion, beginning with him receiving a notice of winning a small poetry prize. The award ceremony is an unforgettable scene, with its speeches and poetry readings punctuated by Mr. Enderby's emissions of wind. He meets a journalist from a women's magazine; she will play a significant role in his later life. We follow comical adventures related to Mr. Enderby's inebriation in London, a wonderfully demented story that concludes Part 1 on the novel. Two other parts take place mainly in other locations: in Italy and in the north of England. The ending is in a way similar to that of Clockwork Orange, as improbable as it may seem.

While this is a very funny novel - I was laughing out loud many, many times - it is also extremely dark. It offers a pessimistic view of contemporary culture (contemporary in 1963, but then we only went downhill thanks to TV and Internet), yet the main message seems to be the damage that broken childhoods inflict on people. Mr. Enderby had been traumatized by his stepmother, from whose intimidating specter he has been trying to escape all his life.

It is Mr. Burgess' prose, though, that I find the main value of the novel. From its breathtaking beginning through many unforgettable passages - for instance, Mr. Enderby's horrific experiences in Castel Gandolfo - I have been savoring the author's writing. The text is richly sprinkled with fragments of poetry, mostly of Mr. Enderby's authorship. Many passages are truly hilarious like the one where the poet is trying to ascertain whether he is in command of his male qualities:

"He stealthily felt his way down to find out what was his body's view of this constatation, but all was quiet there, as though he were calmly reading Jane Austen."

On the other hand, I am not a particular fan of Mr. Enderby's (or perhaps the author's) severe obsession with the non-decorative aspects of human physiology: burps, farts, dandruff, urine, belching, boil-scars, vomit, ear wax, teeth-picking and the like, which permeate the novel. Yet Mr. Burgess' brilliance in handling the language, the syntax, the sound, and the vocabulary are so masterful that they can carry whatever content is thrown there, even the ugly detritus of our body works.

Three and three quarter stars.


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