TOM’S LESS SHARPE

Something happens to people as they get older, and to comic writers more than to the rest of us. Some get so crotchety they just can’t bear to make it funny anymore, while others seem to lose their grip on what divides the comic from the cruel-hearted, the ribald from the crude. But every humorist — from Aristophanes to Donald Westlake — can’t help but get a little thin as time goes by. It’s not that the old dog forgets his tricks; it’s that he gets too sleepy to show them off much any more.

There was a moment, twenty-five years ago, when the British novelist Tom Sharpe was the funniest writer in English. He had his share of tricks, of course — the least forgivable being his weakness for the “Top soil for sale, dirt cheap” kind of puns created by the exhumation of dead metaphors. But they were swallowed up by his strength of comic energy: Fleeing one calamity, his characters invariably fell through the trapdoor into another. In little inevitable steps, small embarrassments escalated into biblical catastrophes.

Now nearly seventy years old, Sharpe has just published The Midden, his first novel in eleven years.

The man was always a little crotchety. In his most hilarious work, the 1978 drop-to-the-floor-and-howl classic The Throwback — for some years out of print, but now reissued by Pan Books — he betrayed a hatred of British culture so capacious it embraced virtually every Englishman since the Napoleonic Wars. And he has always trembled on the edge of crudity: In his best-known work, the 1974 Porterhouse Blue, a character (in an attempt to hide the evidence of an inadvertent theft) fills two gross of condoms with gas from his cooking ring and floats them up the chimney — only to demolish half his Cambridge college and blizzard the university with flakes of lubricated latex when he forgets to tell his cleaning woman not to light the fire. But The Midden suffers not so much from the novelist’s old faults as from a new one: The vim that was his strength has dimmed a little. Sharpe has begun to conserve his strength and bank the fires of comic animation that used to burn on nearly every page.

Born in London in 1928 and educated at Cambridge, Sharpe worked as a teacher and a social worker in South Africa until being deported in 1961. Returning to England, he taught history for the better part of ten years at the sort of red-brick, working-class polytechnic school that he would later use as the setting for Wilt (1976), The Wilt Alternative (1979), and Wilt on High (1984), his trio of novels about a murderously inclined college lecturer.

Though many American humorists have praised him in lavish terms, Sharpe has never attracted a large audience in the United States: A 1989 British movie version of Wilt made only $ 113,000 from its American release. But the success in England of his first two works — Riotous Assembly (1971) and Indecent Exposure (1973), a pair of satires of everyone in South Africa — allowed him to quit his teaching and devote his time solely to writing. Ten books followed over the next fifteen years, flailing at targets all over England — from groundskeeping in Blott on the Landscape (1975) to the upper classes in Ancestral Vices (1980) to the Etonian public school in Vintage Stuff (1982).

There is a kind of Red Tory in Great Britain who never warmed to Margaret Thatcher and her hordes of middle-class, suburban voters. Over the years, Sharpe has taken his share of pot-shots at these antiquated conservatives for whom the rise of Benjamin Disraeli in 1868 was a sign of the end of Roast Beastly Old England and true-blue conservatism. But even in his mockery, the novelist remains in many ways something of an old-fashioned Tory himself. And his latest satire is an already somewhat dated tirade against Thatcher’s England — a harangue from so far to the right that it might have come straight from the wild-eyed socialists and unrepentantly lefty Labour party members who felt Britain slipping away from them in the 1980s.

The Midden opens while “The Great Hen” Thatcher still “squawked self- congratulations over the city” and relates the misadventures of Timothy Bright, the stock-broker scion of a decliningly wealthy family, suddenly offered chances at easy money by the changed climate of Thatcherism. Telling the story of the financial and personal disasters after a scandal at Lloyd’s of London, the novel’s early pages follow the not-very-bright Bright as he is chased into hiding by outraged mobs of irate drug dealers, policemen, insurance investigators, and great-aunts.

Once gone to ground, however, Bright virtually disappears from the novel, becoming merely the occasion for a titanic struggle between two eccentrics in the north of England. Sir Arnold Gonders is chief constable of Twixt and Tween, a Thatcherite whose lay sermons

consisted very largely of a series of admonitions which made God sound like the Great Lady herself at her most mercenary. . . . “Our business in the world is to augment the goodness that is God’s love with the fruition of free enterprise and to put aside those things which the Welfare State handed us on a plate and thus deprived us of the need to which we must pay homage. That need, dear brothers and sisters in God, is to take care of ourselves as individuals and so save the rest of the community doing it out of the taxpayer’s pocket.”

His opponent is Miss Marjorie Midden, an aging spinster of the disappearing squirearchical class determined to thwart most of the modern world and possessing, in her own mad way, the real virtues of tradition to which Gonders pays his hypocritical homage.

While Timothy Bright huddles in terror, the pair of new- and old-fangled conservatives wage their war in the countryside around Miss Marjorie’s ” Middenhall,” an enormous and extremely ugly country house built by the Edwardian “Black” Midden “to prove to the world that he had made a fortune out of cheap native labor and the wholesale use of business practices which, even by the lax standards of the day in Johannesburg, were considered more devious and underhand than was socially acceptable.” Converging toward Armageddon at Middenhall are an enormous cast of soon-to-be slaughtered subordinates — including an octogenarian seductrix in a silver cat suit, a class of poor children brought on a country field trip by the Dean of Porterhouse College, a retired and myopic big-game hunter, a police SWAT team (some dressed as sheep), a convention of child-abuse specialists, and a large contingent of prostitutes touring the countryside. The novel ends with the kind of thing Sharpe has always been best at: a disaster that steps from an embarrassing mistake to death, disease, famine, and pestilence — followed by the survivor’s calm surveying of the shattered battleground.

The concluding cataclysm in The Midden is a little cruder and a little more crotchety than such scenes used to be in Sharpe. It is also thinner — the whole scene sketchier and less focused than it would have been in the 1970s. That’s not an unbearable failing for those who have followed the satirist’s works for twenty-five years and can fill in from memory the finer strokes. But readers who missed Tom Sharpe all those years ago should start instead with The Throwback and discover why his admirers are grateful even for a sleepy wag from the old dog.

J. Bottum is Books & Arts editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.