This article was published in the Cambridge Evening News on 5 March 1976.
By Alan Kersey
EVERY MORNING, weather permitting, Tom Sharpe pops Dandy, a Border terrier, into his bicycle basket and the two of them wend their way across Cambridge to the “hut” where he works in Millington Road, Newnham.
The dual purpose of this exercise is to keep Tom (and Dandy) fit, and to allow him to work on his outrageously funny books, away from the interruptions of his three small daughters and the constant stream of visitors who take advantage of his ready hospitality.
When I first met him after the publication of “Indecent Exposure” four years ago, I was convinced of two things: that success was bound to seek him out, and that it would never change his basic way of life. So when I called to see him about his latest book, Wilt, I found the same serviceable Volvo standing in the front drive and the same genial pipe-smoking Tom Sharpe at the door.
“If you ever buy a Rolls Royce, I’ll divorce you,” his Carolina-born wife, Nancy, has promised him. Luckily, he feels the same way, believing that thrift and hard work are two essential ingredients of a well-balanced life. “But she bloody well means it,” he says.
If Tom Sharpe is not, in what others might call the Rolls Royce class now, he probably soon will be. There have always been enthusiastic overtures for the film rights of his first two books based on a hard-gained knowledge of the South African police. (He spent three weeks in various prisons before being thrown out of the country.)
Now a film is just around the corner. Brian Rix has been up to talk about a television series based on the Cambridge-inspired Porterhouse Blue, and he is now working on the film script for Wilt.
Published this week by Secker and Warburg, Wilt overruns the borderlines of farce to trickle into black comedy. It is based on Tom’s bitter-sweet experiences at the Tech, where he was given the task of taking groups of plasterers, slaughtermen and joiners in what is loosely termed Liberal Studies.
Much of the inevitable frustration of that invidious time comes through in the book, in a way that some will see as vindictive, but which he assures me is strictly for laughs.
“All literature is entertainment,” he says unequivocally. “All I am trying to do, is to give people a damned good laugh. If this is at the expense of a few pretentious people whose aim in life is to impress others, then hard luck.”
He dislikes bureaucracy, finds the great majority of University dons boring and, most of all, he hates “codswollop.”
That is why Wilt, the downtrodden and hen-pecked hero of his new farce, has the last laugh on everybody: the swinging wealthy Pringsheims, his silly social-climbing wife, the police and, finally, his superiors who keep passing him over for promotion.
The way he achieves all this is, to say the least, original.
It begins at a boring barbecue given by Gaskell and Sally Pringsheim, where the party-hating Henry Wilt has little option but to get drunk. After repelling the advances of the omniverous Sally Pringsheim, he cracks his head on a cupboard and awakes to find himself attached to a life-size doll.
It is the last symbolic straw for poor old Wilt, who has been indulging himself in wife-murdering fantasies. It crosses his mind as he stuffs the embarrassing plastic doll down a foundation shaft at the Tech that this could be his wife; but he would never have the courage to go through with it. Unfortunately, at the exact moment that the builders spot what looks like a body being buried under fast-drying concrete, Eva Wilt is marooned on a mudbank with the Pringsheims — and nobody knows she is there.
Wilt becomes the man helping police with their inquiries and for the first time, we get a glimpse of the man behind the mouse. A copy of this book was shown to the editor of “Police Review,” who says every policeman should read it. For Wilt turns out to be the most exasperating suspect Inspector Flint has ever come across, goading him to the brink of violence.
It will come as no surprise to those who have read Indecent Exposure or Porterhouse Blue, that contraceptives play a part in the plot. I asked Tom Sharpe if it was fair to regard condoms as his trade mark and, in a way, he agreed that it was.
“There is something obscene about the things and they are ideal for sending up this obsession with sex and all its deviations,” he explained. No doubt they will figure again in his new book, whose anagrammatical title, Pause, O Men, for the Virgin, is not hard to solve.
Wilt, which was the New Fiction Society’s February choice, it not my kind of book, but when I confessed to a couple of belly-laughs, Tom Sharpe was more than satisfied. It is probably his ability to hold the reader between laughs that has led to so many comparisons with Wodehouse — an analogy which in my opinion does neither of them credit. The world of Wodehouse is no longer with us and the world of Sharpe requires much harsher treatment, even if the author is only looking for laughs.