Description
Four works including Inside Mr. Enderby, Enderby Outside, The Clockwork Testament, and Enderby's Dark Lady follow the comic poet's encounters with a professional widow, a plagiarizing pop star, and an African-American nightclub singer. Original.
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Collected for the first time under one cover come the four novels featuring Anthony Burgess's greatest comic creation, the perdurable poet F. X. Enderby.Inside Mr. Enderby introduced to a captivated audience Burgess's dyspeptic poet, whose uniquely idiosyncratic, scatological brand of verse even won the genuine approval of T. S. Eliot. In his first clash with the outside world, Enderby is extracted from his lavatorial sanctuary by the professional widow Vesta Bainbridge in a most peculiar romance. Returning in Enderby Outside, Enderby must deal with incongruous plagiarism from the pop star Yod Crewsley and a visit from an apparent personification of his Muse. Relocated to New York for The Clockwork Testament, or, Enderby's End, Enderby has to defend himself and his first film scenario, which he based on a poem by Gerald Manley Hopkins but - shades of Burgess's A Clockwork Orange - was transmogrified into an X-rated movie. Resurrected by popular demand in Enderby's Dark Lady, the poet must reluctantly play the role of Shakespeare to woo an African-American nightclub singer.Despite his farcical personal life and slightly sordid living habits, Enderby has delighted readers as one of the last dogged individualists, a quiet rebel living in everyone and affirming the creative impulse.
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