however, a woman he's never seen before drops by and pulls a gun on him; she has come to tell him she's read and re-read all his poetry, and is now going to murder him for writing it. First, however, she orders him to strip naked and urinate all over his collected works. Enderby strips, but since he has an erection he cannot obey the rest of her command. The scene ends, apparently, in a sexual encounter. Enderby dies later that night. Themes A Clockwork Testament is laced with Burgess's usual mordant wit, deft literary allusions, and virtuosic wordplay. The world of the book takes its hue from Enderby's brilliant but ever-irritable outsider's psyche. In some ways, the novel echoes Joyce's Ulysses; it covers one day only, casts an unheroic man in the role of hero, and explores that man's physical and mental processes in intimate detail. In place of The Odyssey, Burgess incorporates extended references to St Augustine and Pelagius, and also to Gerard Manley Hopkins, author of a phrase Enderby makes peculiarly his own: "I am gall, I am heartburn." The book blends social satire with self-mockery. In a classroom scene, for example, Enderby is unable to remember his planned lecture on minor Elizabethan dramatists and so on the spur of the moment invents a playwright called 'Gervase Whitelady'. He discourses learnedly on this personage for some time, helped on by a student who begins as a know-it-all but ends as a collaborator, earnestly prompting him with the details of Whitelady's life. Enderby abruptly concludes the lecture by dismissing his imaginary playwright as a failure— at which point he recognises his creation as a mirror image of himself. Later, at his poetry-writing class, Enderby finds little to admire in his students' undisciplined effusions and tries to impress on them that poetry arises from craftsmanlike effort, not emotional self-indulgence. The students, however, just look at him pityingly and ask him when he plans to leave. As the title suggests, The Clockwork Testament also gives the author a chance to explore his own bemusement over Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange: Burgess came to hate the film that made him famous. This autobiographical element is most apparent in the talk show scene, where Enderby's fellow guests (an actress and a psychologist) attack the poet for his involvement in a film version of "The Wreck of the Deutschland", which