Inside Mr Enderby

Anthony Burgess always said that his least favourite of his novels was A Clockwork Orange.  I read that book when I was about 15 or 16 and I loved it.  It’s amazing in the way it plays with language- it’s barely in English but by the end Nadsat’s completely understandable.  So I was naturally really excited to read more of Burgess’s work; namely Inside Mr Enderby- his only other entry on The List.  And I’ve got to said I was bitterly disappointed. 

The book tells the tale of Mr Enderby, a professional poet.  He’s pretty shit at the poetry.  And life in general.  After having several a few small successes poetry-wise he ends up marrying Vesta Bainbridge, editor of a woman’s magazine.  He can’t handle her.  He doesn’t want her- he sees her as a suffocating surrogate for his dead step-mother.  With Vesta he is unable to write poetry.  Anyway, the marriage is unsurprisingly short and following a mental breakdown Enderby attempts suicide ending up in hospital, reborn as Piggy Hogg, he gives up the poetry for a (presumably) better life.  This life continues on to sequels.  I did not bother with the sequels.

As I said earlier, I did not enjoy this book.  I think my main issue with Inside Mr Enderby was simply that I’m too young.  I know that this book is a satire and I can tell where the punchlines are.  The real issue is that I’m too young to remember the period of time that it’s satirising.  It feels a bit like watching an episode of Spitting Image- I get the jokes, but there’s a whole whack of cultural context that I just don’t get.  What’s especially annoying is the fact that it’s the more subtle humour that I’m not getting.  There are numerous references to things like flatulence that aren’t really my kind of humour and those are the main bits that don’t require a context. 

One of my other issues with the book was the ending.  Throughout the novel Enderby is completely uninterested in sex.  He’s not harmed by it, he just does not care for it.  It’s one of the many things he is cured of in the novels conclusion and that’s what annoys me.  He does not need curing.  He’s a bit of a loser and a jerk for most of the book, but he is not sick.  He only becomes unwell when he loses his ability to write poetry and so the change in him makes no sense.  His cure is to give up the thing that made him happy as a childish pursuit and instead chase something that he has never wanted previously.  I think my problem is that I didn’t read Enderby as a comic character.  I felt for him when his marriage fell apart because his wife wanted things he could never give.  I feel for him at the end when he’s chided along to a better life by a wry and smug doctor.  And I don’t believe it was Burgesses intention for the reader to empathise with his main character in that way.  The narrative is harsh and cruel and mocking and he just needs a bit of understanding.

I wish this book were better.  I know that Anthony Burgess was capable of brilliant things- even if he was disparaging of them.   Maybe he just had poor judgement.  Inside Mr Enderby is ridiculous judgemental of its main character; a fairly pathetic and harmless man, and Burgess hated his most famous work.  It’ll probably be quite a while before I come back to any of Burgess’s other books and not just because there are no others on The List.  I feel like he must have written something else good.  For me, that just wasn’t Inside Mr Enderby.

Next time: The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende.