He spends it in New York City, where for the past several months he's been working as a visiting professor of English literature and composing a long poem about St Augustine and Pelagius.

Publican Enderby served the man a Scotch and pitched him an idea for a new film—an adaptation of Gerard Manley Hopkins's poetic masterpiece "The Wreck of the Deutschland".

Between attacks, he goes about his business: he happily works on his Pelagian poem; eats dyspeptic American food and smokes White Owl cigars; refuses an offer of sex from a female poetry student who wants him to give her an A; struggles through two lectures; appears on a smarmy talk show; and draws a sword he carries hidden in his cane to defend a middle-aged housewife from a gang of thugs on the subway.

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."

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'.

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 has been accused of inspiring violence against nuns.

Enderby, forced to defend a movie that he considers a punishment to Hopkins, reiterates the central themes of A Clockwork Orange: the human need to choose freely between good and evil, and the daemonic, joyous nature of man's creative inner self.