This article, by Jackie Aplin, was published in Wales on Sunday, 27 May 1990.
ANY prospective Hay festival-goers who feel intimidated by all those great intellects can be assured that novelist Tom Sharpe will put them at ease.
“I’m a simple-minded brute,” he explained. This simple mind will be turned on Saturday to discussion of John Buchan’s classic thriller, The 39 Steps, as well as to a one hour reading of his own work the following Monday.
“I do like thrillers. I’m currently reading a Freeling detective story. People want the excitement of it. I like the adventure and identify with it. As a kid I loved the notion of catching a train, going somewhere and sleeping rough, then later I wrote Vintage Stuff about a man obsessed with thrillers who becomes disillusioned. I liked that.”
“I enjoy Buchan, though he sticks a bit in his social attitudes. It might have been true to life then but now I find it peculiar. He was a horrendous snob and rather weird . He also claimed to be a bit fay, which puzzles me.”
For many, the real draw will be Sharpe’s own work. From his first novel onward he has carved a niche in British writing with works like Porterhouse Blue, Wilt, Indecent Exposure and Blott on the Landscape, and is now “very comfortably off.”
With most of his work being made into television and film adaptations, he is one of the most popular writers in Britain today.
The first novel he wrote, Riotous Assembly, was turned down by publishers Michael Joseph, to their lasting regret.
“The editor wanted me, but the reader didn’t. I was turned down for Alison Lurie. Years later Max Hastings told me that his mother-in-law, Mrs Joseph, had called a meeting to find out how it had happened.”
Yet the man behind these mammoth successes did not begin writing until he was 42.
He was a photographer in South Africa — “I was rather good at babies” — then taught at a technical college at Cambridge.
At this point he wrote serious plays. “They were lousy — I got it out of my system. It’s much more fun to do this.”
Then he got enough money together to take a year off. “At work they were asking me when I was coming back, and my friends were warning me not to do it, so I had to make a success of it.”
The result was Riotous Assembly. “It started life as a serious story and it surprised me by becoming funny.”
Since then all his work has been darkly wicked and very popular fiction, described in The Guardian as “a stunning orgiastic satire.”
Sharpe is writing at the moment but he will not call it a novel yet. “Once I’ve finished the first draft I can say it’s in hand. I don’t sit down and plot ahead, I throw a lot away. I’ve reached page 165 or 200 and thrown work away because it was rubbish.”
“Comedy’s not the same as some other sorts of books. I can’t plan my kind of book. It’s like pushing a snowball, it either begins to roll or it doesn’t. Generally I get a person, he gets into a situation and it develops. A lot of it’s penwork, not the writer.”
Caption: TOM SHARPE: He has carved a niche in British writing