['A Faust Book'] is full of cunning literary allusions and learned puns (of which I probably missed as many as I recognised) and the perfect reader of Enright's book would be a widely read don with something of his own donnish turn of mind.

Considered only in these terms Enright's 'Faust' is a very funny book. He has a great knack for sliding from the sixteenth century into our own and back again; and much of the humour comes from comic and pointed anachronisms. But this is plainly a book about 1979, and the trappings of the sixteenth century are really no more than a device for a sharp satirical glare at our own times….

[A] careful reading of Enright's 'Faust' shows that traditional morality is a scarlet thread running through the work from start to finish. Because the Faust legend is set as much in hell as on...