David Blackburn

Tom Sharpe nearly killed me

I was on a train when it happened. I was bent double with my head between my knees, gasping for air and unable to speak. The Surrey matriarch sitting opposite leant forward to ask me if she could help. I imagine she thought that I was choking, or perhaps suffering cardiac arrest. In fact, I was laughing. Laughing so hard I couldn’t stop. And the more I wanted to stop, the worse it got. It was painful. My lungs rasped and the muscles in my sides contracted of their own free will. I was no longer master of myself, so you might say that I was in ecstasy. It was certainly exhilarating.

I regained composure and explained myself to this kind woman. She looked stern; her immaculate curls bristling slightly at my wildness. She reminded me of the serious gentleman who had sat next to me some years before during a performance of the Merry Wives of Windsor, starring Leslie Phillips as Falstaff. He told my chortling mother to ‘stop laughing at Shakespeare’.

Back on the train, it was all Tom Sharpe’s fault. I had been reading Wilt. Specifically the section where the gin-fuelled Henry Wilt, the everyman anti-hero of the book, attempts to stuff a strong-willed sex doll, mocked up in his wife’s clothes and lipstick, down a manhole. Wilt is test-running a scheme to murder his insufferable wife. Wilt’s failure with the doll is total, and an elaborate farce blossoms from this blackly hilarious beginning.

Tom Sharpe, who died yesterday aged 85, wrote several very popular novels between 1971 and the mid-80s. They defy the categorisation favoured by publishers and much ‘book chat’. They are not trashy genre fiction; but neither are they literary. Sharpe is often marked as a descendent of Evelyn Waugh; but, while Decline and Fall and the Basil Seal novels share common ground with Wilt and Porterhouse Blue, there is nothing in Sharpe’s oeuvre to match the literary achievement of the Sword of Honour trilogy.

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