It seemed well-trodden ground for D. J. Enright to cover in Paradise Illustrated, his sequence of poems updating the Fall; I thought the joke had been better done by other, less sophis ticated, artists. Now, in A Faust Book, he has followed the exhortations of Heine and Valéry to do your own Faust, and come up with an altogether subtler, funnier and more sustained set of personal variations on the legend. His Faust and Mephistopheles are, for one thing, not put so relentlessly through all the latest hoops: the story seems to have compelled Enright to treat it a bit more on its own terms; perhaps a moral in that, about its more convincing relevance to our own times…. A Faust Book moves steadily through the Faust tale from beginning to end, getting most mileage out of its potential for modern academic and political satire; and using a considerable variety of forms. Enright perennially defines the boundaries of human achievement—of human decency and honesty—by outlining the cynical plausibility of the forces of darkness. In the past, he's rarely done the positive side with much conviction since his first two or three books; but his Faust comes much nearer to the scope and range of his best earlier work than "middle" Enright, which was always funny, and right, yet infallibly depressing and sometimes repetitive. (p. 67)
Alan Brownjohn, "An Unprovincial Province," in Encounter, Vol. LIV, No. 1, January, 1980, pp. 64-8, 70.∗
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