In this guest blog, Will Franken, who was shortlisted for the 2025 Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize, reviews the Irwell Edition of The Clockwork Testament by Anthony Burgess, edited by Ákos Farkas and published by Manchester University Press.

A question looms over the recent Irwell edition of Anthony Burgess’s The Clockwork Testament (1974), which is why have Manchester University Press elected to publish the third instalment of the author’s Enderby Quartet first? For anyone who has already read the original, however, the answer to this should become apparent well before finishing Ákos Farkas’s introductory remarks. Releasing this volume ahead of its two antecedents, Inside Mr Enderby (1963) and Enderby Outside (1968), may represent a slight transgression of bibliographical chronology, but in terms of biographical exigency, Farkas’s scholarly contribution to Burgess’s oeuvre couldn’t have been more timely.

As the anachronistic protagonist now navigates his way through the multicultural metropolis of New York City, his erstwhile ecumenical chauvinism is parcelled out with considerably more inflammatory gender-based and racial specificity than was seen in the first two episodes. Hence, there is somewhat of an understandable urgency to distance the author from his character, who is pronouncedly at his most ethnically insensitive here in The Clockwork Testament. To this effect, Farkas’s well-crafted introduction, as well as the appendices and annotations which follow the main text, serve their noblest purpose in promoting an accurately balanced appreciation of Burgess’s authorial intent while at the same time clearing away some potentially damaging misconceptions.

That there are stark biographical parallels uniting Francis Xavier Enderby to Anthony Burgess has already been well established by previous scholars of the Enderby Quartet as well as by the author himself. Like his hapless character, Burgess, too, was employed as a visiting professor of English at a Manhattan university in the early 1970s. Both he and Enderby rented a New York apartment from a radical feminist writer who remains unnamed in The Clockwork Testament but who is based on, as the annotations helpfully inform us, the American poet Adrienne Rich. Most importantly, Burgess and his protagonist are each compelled to defend their art against the histrionic allegation that it encourages violence, the real-life ramifications of Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 cinematic adaption of A Clockwork Orange here fictionalised as the farcical fallout from Enderby’s ridiculously erudite contributions to the screenplay for Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Victorian-era ode, The Wreck of the Deutschland.

Farkas’s greatest service to the legacy of Anthony Burgess, and the same could be said for all the Irwell Editions of the author’s works so far released, is in meticulously tracing where the rigidness of reality yields to the exaggeration of fiction. Burgess and Enderby do indeed share a contempt for the benightedness of modern culture, exemplified most poignantly in the transcript of the cross-purposes daytime TV chaos of The Sperr Lansing Show which occupies the entirety of chapter seven.

The genuine and the fictive also converge in their disdain for the erosion of university educational standards. ‘What had been a centre of incorrupt learning was now a whorehouse of progressive intellectual abdication,’ relates the acerbic narrator in chapter four, as Enderby heads off to campus. Ever the chronological outcast, he may be the English instructor his students need, but he certainly isn’t the one they want. Enderby isn’t about to skin up a joint with the youngsters, put on a Grateful Dead album, and rap with them about Marx and The Man. In this regard, it isn’t so much that Enderby has failed as a teacher, but as an entertainer floundering at another form of showbusiness. Both on television and in the classroom, he is endearingly unable and unwilling to observe the golden rule of performing for philistines, which is to always give them what they want. Whether, however, this rancour towards artistic and academic neglect translates into actual racism and misogyny beyond the page is a matter that has been disproven on multiple occasions, with the most recent and convincing of these refutations being the present critical edition of The Clockwork Testament.

The relevance of this demarcation, particularly in the present-day pandemonium of do-it-yourself internet scholarship, cannot be overstressed. No longer alive to defend himself, social media’s algorithmic proclivity for simplifying complex literary figures to easily-digestible units of pseudo-political debate leaves an author like Anthony Burgess in perpetual risk of being denuded of wholeness and intentionally recast to serve either the role of cartoon devil or two-dimensional representative of old-fashioned literary machismo.

As has too often been the case with the best examples of cultural satire, The Clockwork Testament, by its very unapologetic tone, will continue to flummox those who refuse to engage sincerely with its narrative. Whereas progressive digital activists might clumsily conflate Enderby with Burgess and denounce both for their presumed infractions against racial and gender consciousness, their counterparts in the beguiling inanity of the illusory left-right divide stand poised to recruit him as a veneer of intellectual legitimacy to gild their postmillennial xenophobia and sexism, as many of their ilk have already done with George Orwell. The reality, however, is that The Clockwork Testament is charmingly unfazed by either faction. If any doubt still lingered that one of Burgess’s primary aims in this volume was to transcend the fashionable stupidity of politics by invoking the universality of literature, Farkas has done his level best here to obviate it.

On the one hand, Enderby’s sardonic improvisation of the appellations ‘shehit’ and ‘heshit’ to placate Lydia Tietjens’s militant testiness over the linguistic masculinisation of God is not patriarchal insensitivity, but gently deconstructive wordplay, exposing the inconsequentiality of pronoun designations to weighty theological discussions. With equal aplomb, Burgess upends any right-wing expectations by casting the assailants of chapter eight as a pair of WASPish and educated-looking young men, well after Enderby has already compared the New York City public transit system to a haven for ‘potential black and brown devils ready to rob, slice, and rape.’ Finally, cleverly confounding the dogmas of either extreme, there is the dark irony of how Enderby’s loathing for the modern university student’s fixation on ethnicity has caused him to become fixated on the ethnicities of his modern university students, seeing in them an assortment of sloppy Vikings, Latin nymphs, Talmudist cannibal Jews, melanoids and melononipponese, these latter two, Farkas enlightens us, terms of Burgess’s own coinage.

And yet occasionally permeating this classroom hypocrisy and other instances of his unrelenting abrasiveness is a sort of frustrated love. We glimpse, for instance, not the brittle effects of cynicism but instead its cause, a failed romanticism, when the flailing Enderby unleashes upon his unappreciative students the bitter truth: ‘You’ll never prevail against the big bastards of computerized organizations that are kindly letting you enjoy the illusion of freedom.’

In this one statement, Burgess’s uncanny prescience in diagnosing the systemic ills atrophying artistic progress is emphatically illustrated. Things are bad enough for Enderby in 1974, but it’s still over half a century away from our own inundation of cutely-monikered platforms, developmentally-stifling emojis, and intoxicated adherents to artificial intelligence.

Farkas’s accompanying critical materials nearly double the size of the original novella, but this is largely to ensure the underlying moral of the work is better understood. Through Enderby, Burgess is, in fact, warning that when the human race becomes fragmented into micro-communities of race, gender, or creed, the individual is blocked off from the liberating power of art. Panning outwards beyond the academic settings, we also witness the apathetic submission to state-financed schemes of behavioural psychology, a recapitulation of Burgess’s most famous thematic nemesis from A Clockwork Orange. Personified here in the figure of Man Balaglas, a stand-in, relates Farkas, for B.F. Skinner, Enderby’s opposition to the stultifying status quo takes on the solemnity of a lost cause while never sacrificing one degree of its quixotic hilarity. The character’s archaic preoccupations with the formalities of poetic metre and heroic couplets, or, for that matter, the issues of individual freewill and collective conditioning, versified as an ongoing dialect between St. Augustine and the English heretic Pelagius, noble pursuits in and of themselves are, in actuality, comedic affronts to the pervasive idiocy of the cultural climate in all its malignant forms.

By clarifying the contextual ephemera of the piece, Farkas encourages the reader to fully understand the politically transcendental and pro-literary message of The Clockwork Testament. His consistently even-handed tone and remarkable depth of research, aided in no small part by the archivists at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, dexterously accentuates the refreshingly complex picture of Burgess and, by extension, that of his beloved Enderby.

For nearly thirty years, throughout America and Europe, William Franken has been performing his own brand of Juvenalian satire in high-speed, multi-character productions, receiving praise from such comic luminaries as Harry Hill, Stewart Lee, Rory Bremner, and the late Robin Williams as well as garnering favourable reviews in publications including the Guardian, the Scotsman, and the New York Times. In his prior incarnation, he was a university-level instructor, having obtained his MA from Missouri State University in English Literature and his academic work can be read in the publications The Philosopher and the Huntington Library Quarterly, among others. In 2017 Franken was the recipient of the Tithe Grant Award from the William Blake Society and, more recently, he was a shortlistee for the 2025 Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism.

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