This article appeared in The Times on 13 July 1992.
Harry Eyres reports on a dispute between Tom Sharpe and Nigel Williams about the potential of the comic novel
The English comic novel is often supposed to exist in a never-never land propelled by eccentrics and pigs. In this escapist-world “falls not hail, or rain, or any snow/ Nor ever wind blows loudly” — except, perhaps, when expelled (in the works of Tom Sharpe) from deflating condoms.
But these placid pastures, normally grazed by Wodehousian sheep, have been rent by the ugly snarl of literary controversy. Sharpe himself, the grand old man of the genre, has savaged Nigel Williams, the 42-year-old editor of BBC TV’s Omnibus and, according to some, chief pretender for Sharpe’s humorous laurels. Sharpe (in the London Evening Standard) maintains that Williams, in his new novel They Came from SW19 (published last week by Faber), has committed a cardinal sin: he has mixed light entertainment with drab realism.
The book that brought Williams into contention for the comic crown was The Wimbledon Poisoner. A considerably more dangerous version of Mr. Pooter ran amok in leafy suburban byways, causing multiple fatalities with household cleansers, but failing in his main objective of murdering his wife. The Wimbledon Poisoner won fame, rightly, because it is one of those rare books that cause adults to burst into helpless laughter in public places. Even so, there is something disconcerting about its humour. While not being wholly believable, the novel is not totally, safely unreal either.
In his new book Williams mixes genres and tones more daringly. At the beginning a hard-bitten 14-year-old, Simon, loses his father, apparently the victim of a heart attack. But since his mother belongs to a loony spiritualist sect, she and her awful cronies regard his death as a blessing. Simon is healthily sceptical about the spiritualists, but has more time for another weird group of Wimbledonians who gather on the Common to welcome UFOs.
The book makes fun both of spiritualists and “ufologists”, but tackles the theme of adolescent rite of passage with some seriousness and ends with surprising sadness. It might be described as a mixture of Adrian Mole and Jeannette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, except that it is not really like either. Perhaps Sharpe disapproves because, while making readers laugh, it also makes them uneasy.
“It is clearly dangerous to mix genres,” says Williams. “But all the comic novels I really admire are mixtures. With Evelyn Waugh, for instance, there is no distinction between the vision which produced Scoop and the vision which produced A Handful of Dust. Even Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat would not be the same without the long passage about Runnymede and Magna Carta. The Wind in the Willows is saying something quite serious about Edwardian England. I hate the ghettoising of the comic novel.”
For all that, there is a strong escapist strain in English comic fiction. The comic-song duo Flanders and Swann summed it up in At the Drop of Another Hat: “These days satire lurks, hoof in mouth, behind every bush, waiting to strip away the layers of comforting illusion and cosy half-truth. Our job, as we see it, is to put them back again.”
The classic writer in this tradition was P.G. Wodehouse. “Sooner or later one always returns to Wodehouse, whom I admire greatly,” admits Williams. “But he is sui generis; he described his work as musical comedy without music. And although it is obviously escapist, Wodehouse is also whether Biffo or Spiffy is going to get the girl. His school stories, in a way, are deadly serious.”
Schoolboy larkiness is surely one of the keys to the tradition. So many English comic novels seem to want to preserve in nostalgic amber a boyish hilarity that is threatened by sex, adolescence, women. Most of them are also written by men, though Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole books (“I love Adrian Mole but he’s eternally in his playpen,” says Williams) are an exception.
Here Williams may be more in the mainstream than he thinks: the women in his books tend to be either mousy or monstrous, and the perspective is very much a male one.
Indeed, that is something he shares with Sharpe. “I once interviewed Sharpe about Wodehouse,” Williams recalls, “and asked him about the relationship of Wodehouse’s books with life. He seemed to feel it was quite inappropriate to ask such questions. Yet in Sharpe’s best books, such as Riotous Assembly, the humour is inspired by anger and irritation about a real situation, in that case South Africa.”
Here we reach the nub of the argument: Williams refutes the idea that humour is escapist. “Ask someone like Neil Simon what makes a joke funny and he will always say it is the reality in the joke. There is a sort of pre-pubescent humour in Wodehouse or Adrian Mole, but it doesn’t really work when you’re aged between 12 and 60. The kind of humour I like is when you suddenly see something incongruous. This can happen in the most unfunny circumstances. In fact, humour is there to make awful things bearable.”
Williams illustrates what he means in the slightly disconcerting manner: familiar from his novels, by telling and anecdote about his father’s death. “We were in the hospital, my brother and I, and the nurse came up to my brother and said: ‘I’m afraid your father’s not very well. Actually he’s very poorly indeed. In fact, he’s dead.’ She was building up to it, you see. It was actually excruciatingly funny; my brother and I laughed about it later and I know my father would have found it hilarious.”
Probably the least funny thing about being known as a funny novelist is having to come up with the goods, time and time again. “I think when you start churning it out mechanically, which I fear is what has happened recently with Tom Sharpe, that’s the end,” says Williams. “But there are days when nothing much seems funny at all. Being a comic novelist can get a chomp down, you know.” But this itself, delivered in a somewhat Eeyore-ish tone, was rather funny, in a way.
Photo caption: Evelyn Waugh and P.G. Wodehouse epitomise the two comic novel traditions; Nigel Williams (below) puts himself in the Waugh camp