This book review by Tom Sharpe was published in the Evening Standard on 19 March 1992.
UNSWEET CHARITY
by Keith Waterhouse
(Hodder £14.99)
I DON’T suppose it has ever crossed Keith Waterhouse’s mind that he might be a serious novelist, and I can assure a potential reader that he certainly hasn’t written his latest novel with the Booker prize in mind.
Whatever Unsweet Charity is, it isn’t, thank Heaven, a deliberate exercise in the “significant” or the “sensitive”.
Quite the opposite, from its bizarre sexual overtures in church at a funeral, until the appalling debacle of Bananaskin Week, there is no sign of any more serious intention on the author’s part than to amuse. In this he has succeeded entirely.
With one guffaw after another he has swept aside the misery makers, the “political correctors” and the new health puritans who are seeping like some moral plague-carriers from university campuses of the United States. Their doom-laden message has no place in Unsweet Charity.
Instead the male characters manage to combine an inordinate consumption of alcohol, particularly in the morning, with what can well be described and envied as “sexual athleticism” of Olympic order. They are clearly impervious to shame or self doubt even when caught in some fearful predicament.
The women are even less inhibited and the leading lady, an apt term in this case, Rosie Greenleaf, has so many different positions that an addendum is presumably required for the Kama Sutra.
But not everyone in Badger’s Heath is so open and joyful. Beneath the skein of alcohol and sex a darker side begins to emerge.
The decadence of this bizarre commuterville in Sussex reminded this reader of the true financial beneficiaries of the Thatcher era. The good people of Badger’s Heath still their consciences by swelling the bank accounts of charitable organisations and corrupt financiers while doing nothing for the Children of the Rainforest or the latest Threatened Species.
In fact they are only restrained from wearing collecting boxes as nose bags by the need to swig gin and tonics morning, noon and night, while falling prey to cunning young men from London, who hatch plots involving cameras (my only worry was to wonder how even a deeply coupled pair could mistake the blast of an electronic flash on a dark night in a cemetery) and a form of persuasion amounting to psychological jujitsu.
All this is done with such a delightfully light touch that I found myself reading non-stop, although I did tend to skip the too-frequent committee minutes.
Apart from these minor longueurs, the story moves along rapidly and the characterisation is etched so lightly that, as usual, Keith Waterhouse disguises his most telling points until they become almost invisible. Not that their effect is lacking.
Without noticing it we are in the grip of cartoon that goes a long way to explain the moral cowardice of a society which has, for half a century, allowed the likes of Robert Maxwell and his criminal ilk in the City establishments to turn the maxim that an Englishman’s word is his bond into a universal joke.
A book that does that is surely a serious one.