['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 earth—wherever Mephistopheles is, he creates a hell all around him—and partly, perhaps, because it is notoriously easier to describe hell than heaven, most of this poem is about the pains, follies and vices of mankind….

Some of the jokes fall flat: sometimes Mr Enright is too keen for the applause of the Senior Common Room: but this is a good poem, and a serious one. The best of the jokes are serious which certainly doesn't mean that they are not the sort we laugh at. It seems to me that the message, however drily delivered, is that hope is a virtue, which should be practised in our own time as in every other.