This article appeared in the Londoner’s Diary column of the Evening Standard on 19 May 1995.
AT A TIME when books are being written in commercial breaks, it is refreshing to hear that Tom Sharpe has finished his latest comic novel after 11 years. It is called Grantchester Grind, and will be published by Secker & Warburg in September. Sharpe, author of Porterhouse Blue, does not think that 11 years constitutes writer’s block.
“I write every day,” he insists. “But my writing of words is not so easy. I’ve written another novel as well, which will come out next year sometime.”
Sharpe, 67, wrote Grantchester Grind (named after a constitutional walk in Cambridge) in Spain. “A cabinet maker in Spain put it very well. I said to him, ‘You are a perfectionist.’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘perfectionism only exists in heaven and heaven doesn’t exist.’ Perfectionism is 80 per cent of what I would like to achieve. You never get 100 per cent.”