This book review by Tom Sharpe was published in the Evening Standard on 2 July 1992.
THEY CAME FROM SW19
by Nigel Williams
(Faber and Faber £14.99)
NIGEL Williams’s new novel is that strange hybrid which, I suppose, must be called the modern comic novel. It has as its narrator a witty boy whose drab and seedy mother tells him on page one that his seedy father has just died of a heart attack.
The boy, an up-market version of Adrian Mole but lacking any of the latter’s vitality, has the bleakest possible view of life but maintains a clever and stoical commentary on the neighbourhood in which he lives, which is drab and seedy; on the First Church of Christ the Spiritualist, Wimbledon, and on the crooked bank manager, Quigley, who runs it.
The boy describes Mrs Quigley, the medium, very perceptively. “Got her in a darkened room and mention Jesus a couple of times and she is doing things a world-class athlete could not manage”.
The boy rightly resists any seedy religious entrapment and much prefers the company of Mr Marr, a pleasant eccentric, who spends his nights waiting for aliens to land on Wimbledon Common.
The only pleasant characters in the book gather here. Unfortunately there are just three of them: Mr Marr, a deaf and dumb youth who is huge and lost, and a small hunchback. The eccentric is killed off almost immediately, supposedly taken by aliens but actually run over by a member of the Spiritualist Church’s congregation, a man called Pike who finally commits suicide under the wheels of a truck.
The boy’s father hasn’t died but, coming round in the mortuary, ties his tag on the unidentified corpse of the nice eccentric. This allows him to leave his seedy and drab wife to live with another seedy woman.
There is a brief reunion between the boy and his father in a pub garden under a huge chestnut tree “in the terminal stages of yellow!” It is all very grim and real. The boy is stoical and aware too that he is seedy and drab himself but that he’s got to live with it.
This then is an example of the modern comic novel. Its failure lies in the impossibility of combining the explicit social message demanded by literary drabbles with the light entertainment more discriminating readers are prepared to buy in bookshops. Life is grim enough already without being forced to read how grim and seedy and drab it is.