This article appeared in the Daily Mirror on 23 May 1975.
I laughed so much when I read Tom Sharpe’s first three novels on holiday last year that Mrs. Ward moved into another bedroom for nearly a week until I had finished the last page.
His fourth novel, BLOTT ON THE LANDSCAPE* was published this week and I’m afraid my conjugal rights were again suspended. It was a small price to pay. “Thank God you have finished that bloody book,” said Mrs. Ward. No sense of humour, women.
Pure
Mr. Sharpe’s novels are pure farce, usually filled with stock characters of English fiction. Blott, for instance, is gardener to Tory MP Sir Giles and his wife Lady Maud, whose stately home is threatened by a proposed motorway. It is often very rude indeed. “Crude,” as one critic put it, but others have compared him to P. G. Wodehouse. “Of course, I’m very flattered,” says Mr. Sharpe.
Clown
He didn’t write his first book until he was 40, while he was teaching liberal studies at Cambridge Technical College. “It was only then that I discovered that instead of being the serious academic I had imagined myself to be, I was really a clown,” he says.
“I thought, if I’m going to make a living out of writing I have to compete with television. Therefore I will indulge in any degree of vulgarity or cliche.
“But embedded in all my books is what I also happen to feel, what I consider important.
“All my heroes are basically peasants with aspirations, low cunning and guts. These are the people I most admire.”
Mr. Sharpe’s first two novels were black farces set in South Africa where he used to work as a Press photographer.
He was eventually deported in circumstances befitting one of his own characters.
“Instead of putting me on an ocean-going liner, they dumped me by mistake on a domestic round-the-coast ferry.
Every time it put into port, police would swarm aboard and I’d be arrested again. I doubt if anyone has been in as many South African jails.”
He lives in Cambridge now with his pretty American wife, Nancy, and their three young daughters.
I’m afraid Mrs. Sharpe has the same problem as Mrs. Ward, since her husband’s books appear to have the same effect on the author as they do on me.
The other night she was woken by the sound of bellowing laughter from her husband’s study where he was working on his latest manuscript.
“I often laugh out loud at my own books,” said Mr. Sharpe, suitably ashamed by his revealed lack of modesty.
*Secker and Warburg. £2.90.
Photo caption: SHARPE: out of favour with my wife.