Toby Clements remembers Tom Sharpe's novels, and the chaotic, hugely comical sex and furious flashes of farcical wit within them.
Author Tom Sharpe photographed
in 2004 for the Daily Telegraph. Photo: Martin
Pope
The Telegraph - 06 June 2013
Unless you knew him personally, what you think about Tom Sharpe the novelist
will probably depend on the age you were when you discovered his books. I was
12, and they were the first glimpse I had of a world in which adults might not
be quite as boring as I’d hitherto believed. Why, I remember wondering, would
anyone want to decorate their bedroom with a thin veneer of rubber, as happens
in Indecent Exposure (1973)? I did not know at the time (not totally sure if I
do now) but I knew it was wrong, and therefore extraordinarily and eye-poppingly
right.
To me his novels were mostly about chaotic, illicit, perverted, hugely
comical sex in which otherwise respectable adults fell over, usually naked, in
the mud. They got their genitals caught on rose bushes, or became enamored of
pneumatic (in both senses) dolls, and were always being arrested by the police
who usually proved themselves the worst of the lot.
Even the covers – by Paul Sample – were a riot of suggestion and provocation;
a hypnotic mix that usually involved a partly dressed, very buxom woman
inflicting some frightful humiliation on a small man, who seems, against all
odds, to be enjoying it.
Of course there was more to Sharpe and his novels than that, as I discovered
once I had calmed down. He was born in England in 1928, educated at Lancing and
then Pembroke College, Cambridge before joining the Marines and serving abroad.
He lived in South Africa during the 1950s where he wrote anti-apartheid plays
until 1961, when he was deported for sedition. This experience inspired his two
first novels – Riotous Assembly (1971) and Indecent Exposure, the latter
dedicated to the South African police force – which involve the hapless
Commandant Van Heerden and the rubber room.
In the ten years between arriving back in Britain and becoming a full time
writer, Sharpe taught at the Cambridge College of Arts and Technology, from
where sprang the inspiration for perhaps his most enduringly appealing and
comical character, Henry Wilt, the luckless everyman against whom the forces of
law and order, feminism, political correctness and just about every other force
known to man – including gravity - conspire.
More
More
