This review of Ancestral Vices appeared in The Sunday Times on 4 January 1981. It was written by Peter Ackroyd. Tom was so incensed by the review that he wrote a letter, published in the same paper the following week. It was the first and only time he replied to a reviewer, as disclosed to Paul Kerton in an interview for The Freelance Writer’s Handbook (1986).
WHEN a novelist decides to write about the sexual molestation and murder of dwarfs, one assumes that he has some good reason for doing so: a sharp statement, perhaps, about perversion and the underprivileged. But Tom Sharpe, in his now characteristic manner, uses the subject simply to reinforce his own evident distaste for sex: only masturbation and bestiality emerge from Ancestral Vices without, as it were, having the bloom rubbed off them. And you don’t have to read much of this baleful and misanthropic book to understand why: they are the only two forms of sexual behaviour which exclude personal relationships. There are no people in “Ancestral Vices”; only rabid automatons who ricochet off each other like marbles in the gutter.
Many of Sharpe’s earlier novels were genuinely funny: in “Porterhouse Blue” and “Wilt,” for example, the sheer accumulation of absurd and unpredictable events, climbing higher and higher in a tower of babble, disguised any flaws there might have been in plot or characterisation. But in “Ancestral Vices” there is nothing interesting or entertaining enough to hold the eye. A left-wing academic, Walden Yapp, has been commissioned to write the history of a family of capitalist entrepreneurs, the Petrefacts—although, for no apparent reason, Yapp spends most of his time entangled with dwarfs and dead animals. The Petrefacts themselves now make their money out of the manufacture of exotic sexual hardware. This is predictable enough: I cannot remember a Sharpe novel where a dildo has not loomed.
But the familiarity of the content now only serves to emphasise the staleness of the humour. Good comic fiction ought to be able to create sympathetic, or at least recognisable, characters. What we get here, instead, is a firm distaste for the world and all the people in it. If these sentences had lips, they would be frozen in a perpetual curl. No character enters the plot of “Ancestral Vices” without leaving it in a state of moral or physical decay, and such is the force of Sharpe’s loathing that he quite disproves the theory that comedy is an oblique or camouflaged form of violence. This is the real thing—pure, undirected aggression.
The book is like some ritual act of exorcism, the barest form of words required to contain certain fantasies and obsessions, and Sharpe spends most of his time, as he says of one of his characters, “in a trance of prurient curiosity.” The world of “Ancestral Vices” is like a dirty seaside postcard which has been slashed to pieces by a maniac. When Walden Yapp finds himself sentenced to life imprisonment for a murder which he has not committed, he sees himself as “the victim of a random and chaotic set of circumstances beyond the powers of his explanation.” But this is not the vision of a Kafka or a Burroughs: the only chaos involved here is that engineered by the author’s own ineptitude.
Behind every cynical or malevolent writer, however, is generally a sentimentalist lurking. Sharpe himself seems to have some peripheral vision of an old and thriving England before women’s libbers, left-wing academics and people with dangerous sexual appetites conspired to destroy it. As a result, his only enduring affection is for the grotesquely simple-minded who have not been affected by the march of events.
If the novel does have a theme, it is of a world sullied by tatty contemporary imaginings. People are misled by simplistic political assumptions and, even, by cheap fiction: like a criminal with a conscience, Sharpe leaves traces of his own guilt everywhere. I can only assume that he has done this deliberately; he is a cut-price Prospero, in the process of drowning his books. The heartlessness and weariness of “Ancestral Vices” suggest, in fact, that he has become bored with farce: when the publisher’s bell rings, only the crudest reflexes remain.