Either I’ve changed or Sharpe’s novels have changed, but I haven’t enjoyed the last few as much as the earlier ones. The farce seems forced.
The setting
For authors who went to public school, public schools hold an infinite fascination, hence the number of novels about them from a profession dominated by former public school-educated pupils. Funny how many of them are comedies or gruesome memoirs of cold showers, buggery, incompetent masters and compulsory games. Funny how many authors of these diatribes then send their own children to the same schools.
Sharpe went to Lancing College then Pembroke College, Cambridge. The Oxbridge part of his education is satirised in Porterhouse Blue; it took till his ninth novel to get round to sticking the boot into public schools.
The plot
According to Wikipedia, Groxbourne, the very minor public school where the novel is set, is based on Bloxham school which Sharpe attended before progressing to Lancing. The masters are a bunch of freaks, the headmaster is only bothered about money and the school’s reputation, there is compulsory games and lots of buggery among the boys. Matron gets caught shagging Major Featherstone. And so on…
One particular master, Slymne, hates another one, the slightly freakish one-eyed Glodstone (he has a glass eye and is fond of wearing a monocle over the other one). Glodstone is a besotted fan of boys adventure stories – Rider Haggard, Henty, Buchan, Bulldog Drummond – which Slymne uses to cook up a witty prank. He forges letters from one of the posher mothers, a certain Comtesse de Montcon, resident at the chateau Carmagnac, addressed to Glodstone, claiming she is in great danger, that her son has told her how brave and bold he is, that only he can rescue her.
Inspired with chivalrous thoughts, obsessed with re-enacting the derring-do of his heroes, Glodstone determines to rescue her. Term has just ended, almost everyone has gone home except for one odd pupil, Peregrine Clyde-Browne, an unusually dim, literal-minded boy who was meant to go on an outward bound course which has been cancelled. A pupil in Glodstone’s form, Peregrine had taken to borrowing from Glodstone’s large library of boys stories, had been infected by these tales of derring-do, and now asks to be taken along.
The result is mayhem. Slymne had gone to great trouble to drive across France a few weeks earlier leaving clues and letters at hotels on the way, and now arranges for Glodstone and Peregrine to find them. Abruptly he has second thoughts and tries to cut them off and the middle of the novel is a quite frankly confusing list of small towns in central France which the two characters race between, writing faked letters and finding them, and re-arranging their plans.
But eventually Glodstone – who has been getting colder and colder feet – and Peregrine – who in a teenager way has become more and more over-excited by the mission – arrive at the chateau Carmagnac. By a series of farcical accidents Glodstone falls into the nearby river and is saved and taken into the chateau to be tended. Peregrine thinks he has been captured by the baddies who are holding the beautiful Comtesse prisoner and so breaks into the chateau, creeping along corridors and terrifying at gunpoint the innocent guests he meets.
For the chateau has these days become a conference centre where a cross section of international intellectuals have gathered to discuss world peace. [This gives Sharpe an opportunity to satirise the attitudes of a whole range of national sterotypes circa 1982 – the oil-rich Arab, the Israeli, the ex-Nazi German, the over-intellectual Frenchman, the suave Brit, and especially the Soviet spokesman and the gung-ho American. It is useful to be reminded that clever people were wringing their hands about international terrorism and third world poverty 35 years ago…] After scaring the guests witless Peregrine escapes out of the chateau via the roof and considers his next move.
The delegates call the police who arrive and set up guard with a police van on the only bridge across the river to the chateau. Next night, determined to rescue his master (and the beautiful Comtesse) Peregrine slips under the van and lights the calor gas stove he and Glodstone had been using to cook with, placing it under the petrol tank. BOOM! Several of the French cops are set alight and the van flies into the river gorge.
The international intellectuals pause mid-argument at the moment when a masked assassin bursts in, starts shooting and all hell breaks loose. In that excess which differentiates farce from comedy, the disguised school boy, fired up on 1930s fiction, shoots the American professor dead and nips the penis of the Russian attendee. Delegates run everywhere screaming, Peregrine eventually finds Glodstone and the terrified Comtesse and hustles them down the road to ‘freedom’.
The Comtesse
Except she isn’t a Comtesse. She is a con artist, born Constance Sugg in Croydon, who was a beauty queen, then hussled her way to America, landed in Las Vegas where she got involved hustling marks for the Mafia, until she hussled and blackmailed the Conte de Montcon and ended up marrying him and moving to his chateau, where a little later he died leaving her penniless. Nowadays she works in the kitchen alongside the staff, as well as organising the conferences which are her only source of income.
Their high-falutin’ romantic dreams pretty crushed, Glodstone and Peregrine find themselves taken under the control of this bossy, manipulative woman. Once back at their car she takes charge. While the French police are activated and begin a nationwide search, Constance navigates the boys in their vintage Bentley back to England.
Not a minute too soon because the French police – convinced they have an international assassin at large – find their own security services trumped once the CIA arrive to sort out the murder of their delegate at the conference. Unfortunately, something of the truth of Peregine and Glodstone’s absence had come out ie Mrs and Mrs Clyde-Browne arrived home from holiday to find a letter saying Peregrine’s outward bound course was cancelled but no Peregrine in sight. When they motor to the school and confront the headmaster, he calls in Slymne and Major Fetherington (who runs the school’s Officer Training Corp and manages the school’s armoury) and the shocking truth emerges that Glodstone has gone on a hare-brained mission to France and taken the psychotic simpleton Peregrine with him.
Slymne’s fate
The headmaster instantly orders Slymne – the master who originated this jolly prank – and the Major to motor non-stop down to the chateau to stop Glodstone and Peregrine causing any trouble. They are, of course, far too late to do that but arrive just in time to be caught and questioned by the French police. Then French security. Then the CIA. The cocktail of drugs these three Forces use on Slymne means he never again fully recovers his sanity.
Glodstone’s fate
Back in England, the Comtesse takes the terrified Glodstone to a plastic surgeon on Harley Street who makes him completely unrecognisable – then marries him, thus ensuring an alibi and she can keep her eye on him.
Clyde-Browne’s fate
Constance/the Comtesse confronts Peregrine’s parents (he is a solicitor who loathes his son) with the fact their son is a murderer and terrifies them with the threat of blackmail, until Mr Clyde-Brown agrees to call in his brother, something in Whitehall. This gives rise to a particularly incomprehensible conference involving the British police, Foreign Office, MI5 and Prime Minister on how to defuse the international incident which is brewing…
And the net result is that MI5 show the visiting American CIA officers a man they claim is Peregrine and a top secret SAS operative. For reasons I didn’t quite follow, this appears to placate them and to close the incident for the Yanks and the French.
Peregrine’s fate
The novel ends rather forcefully, I thought, with a last few pages describing Peregrine’s new job as an undercover agent in the British Army in Northern Ireland. Living wild off the land, killing, gutting and cooking his own livestock from his base in a disused well, he is living the Buchan-Rogue Male-Bulldog dream, and has already assassinated five IRA men, two poachers and an off-duty RUC officer, such that the entire neighbourhood lives in fear.
Parting thought
Although a lot of the plot doesn’t make any sense at all, although people behave like imbeciles and shout and swear at the slightest provocation, although the violence seems forced and excessive and the central part of this novel – Slymne chasing Glodstone round central France – was confused and boring — still, there are moments with a kind of Swiftian intensity which leap out and clutch your throat, and which make this book just about worth reading.
But if I was recommending a Sharpe novel for a newbie to read, this one, along with The Wilt Alternative and Ancestral Vices, would be bottom of the list.
Related links
Pan paperback cover of Vintage Stuff with illustration by Paul Sample
Paul Sample A word about the illustrator of the classic Pan paperback covers of the Sharpe novels, Paul Sample, a prolific illustrator whose grotesquely exaggerated cartoons perfectly capture the excess of Sharpe’s novels. The covers accurately depict numerous details from the texts, and there is a Where’s Wally-type pleasure to be had from trying to match every element of the grotesque tableaux with its source in the story.
The cover above shows the one-eyed schoolmaster Glodstone at the wheel of his vintage Bentley with psychotic schoolboy Peregrine Clyde-Browne next to him. Top right is the French chateau, scene of so much violence, including an American professor being thrown from the battlements into the river, the French police van being blown up on the bridge to the chateau, and the English holidaymakers’ car flipping over.
You can see lots more of his work at Paul Sample’s website.
Tom Sharpe’s novels
1971 – Riotous Assembly – Absurdly violent and frenzied black comedy set in apartheid South Africa as three incompetent police officers try to get to the bottom of the murder of her black cook by a venerable old lady who turns out to be a sex-mad rubber fetishist, a simple operation which leads to the deaths of 21 policemen, numerous dogs, a vulture and the completely wrongful arrest and torture of the old lady’s brother, the bishop of Basutoland.
1973 – Indecent Exposure – Sequel to the above, in which the same Kommandant van Herden is seduced into joining a group of (fake) posh colonial English at their country retreat, leaving Piemburg in charge of his deputy, Luitenant Verkramp, who sets about a) ending all inter-racial sex among the force by applying drastic aversion therapy to his men b) tasks with flushing out communist subversives a group of secret agents who themselves end up destroying most of the town’s infrastructure.
1974 – Porterhouse Blue – Hilarious satire on the stuffiness and conservatism of Oxbridge colleges epitomised by Porterhouse, as a newcomer tries in vain to modernise this ramshackle hidebound institution, with a particularly cunning enemy in the ancient college porter, Skullion.
1975 – Blott on the Landscape – MP and schemer Sir Giles Lynchwood so loathes his battleship wife, Lady Maud, that he connives to have a new motorway routed slap bang through the middle of her ancestral home, Handyman Hall, intending to abscond with the compensation money. But he reckons without his wife’s fearsome retaliation or the incompetence of the man from the Ministry.
1976 – Wilt – Hen-pecked lecturer Henry Wilt is humiliated with a sex doll at a party thrown by the infuriatingly trendy American couple, the Pringsheims. Appalled by his grossness, his dim wife, Eva, disappears on a boating weekend with this ‘fascinating’ and ‘liberated’ couple, so that when Wilt is seen throwing the wretched blow-up doll into the foundations of the extension to his technical college, the police are called which leads to 100 pages of agonisingly funny misunderstandings.
1977 – The Great Pursuit – Literary agent Frederick Frensic receives the anonymous manuscript of an outrageously pornographic novel about the love affair between a 17-year-old boy and an 80-year-old woman, via a firm of solicitors who instruct him to do his best with it. Thus begins a very tangled web in which he palms it off as the work of a pitiful failure of an author, one Peter Piper, and on this basis sells it to both a highbrow but struggling British publisher and a rapaciously commercial American publisher, who only accept it on condition this Piper guy goes on a US tour to promote it. Which is where the elaborate deception starts to go horribly wrong…
1978 – The Throwback – Illegitimate Lockhart Flawse, born and bred in the wastes of Northumberland, marries virginal Jessica whose family own a cul-de-sac of houses in suburban Surrey, and, needing the money to track down his mystery father, Lockhart sets about an elaborate and prolonged campaign to terrorise the tenants out of the homes. Meanwhile, his decrepit grandfather has married Jessica’s mother, she hoping to get money from the nearly-dead old geezer, he determined to screw as much perverse sexual pleasure out of her pretty plump body before he drops dead…
1979 – The Wilt Alternative – After a slow, comic, meandering first 90 pages, this novel changes tone drastically when international terrorists take Wilt and his children hostage in his nice suburban house leading to a stand-off with the cops and Special Branch.
1980 – Ancestral Vices – priggish left-wing academic Walden Yapp is invited by cunning old Lord Petrefact to write an unexpurgated history of the latter’s family of capitalists and exploiters because the old bustard wants to humiliate and ridicule his extended family, but the plot is completely derailed when a dwarf living in the mill town of Buscott where Yapp goes to begin his researches, is killed in an accident and Yapp finds himself the chief suspect for his murder, is arrested, tried and sent to prison, in scenes strongly reminiscent of Henry Wilt’s wrongful arrest in the first Wilt novel.
1982 – Vintage Stuff – A stupid teacher at a minor public school persuades a gullible colleague that one of the parents, a French Comtesse, is being held captive in her chateau. Accompanied by the stupidest boy in school, and armed with guns from the OTC, master and pupil end up shooting some of the attendees at a conference on international peace taking part at said chateau, kidnapping the Comtesse – who turns out to be no Comtesse at all – and blowing up a van full of French cops, bringing down on themselves the full wrath of the French state.
1984 – Wilt On High – Third outing for lecturer in Liberal Studies, Henry Wilt who, through a series of typically ridiculous misunderstandings, finds himself, first of all suspected of being a drug smuggler and so bugged by the police; then captured and interrogated on a US air base where he is delivering an innocuous lecture, on suspicion of being a Russian spy; before, in a frenzied climax, the camp is besieged by a monstrous regiment of anti-nuke mothers and news crews.
1995 – Grantchester Grind – The sequel to Porterhouse Blue, following the adventures of the senior college fellows as they adopt various desperate strategies to sort out Porterhouse College’s ailing finances, climaxing with the appointment of a international drug mafiosi as the new Master.
1996 – The Midden – Miss Marjorie Midden discovers a naked ex-City banker trussed in bedsheets hidden in her rural farmhouse, The Midden, and then the ancestral hall she owns under attack from the demented forces of nearby Scarsgate police force led by their corrupt chief constable Sir Arnold Gonders, in a blistering satire on the corruption and greed of post-Thatcher Britain.
2004 – Wilt in Nowhere – Fourth novel about the misadventures of Henry Wilt in which his wife Eva and the 14-year-old quads ruin the life of Uncle Wally and Auntie Joanie over in the States, while Wilt goes on an innocent walking holiday only to be accidentally knocked out and find himself implicated in a complicated murder-arson-child pornography scandal.
2009 – The Gropes – Driven out of his mind by his wife, Vera’s, sentimental fantasies, timid bank manager Horace Wiley pretends he wants to murder their teenage son Esmond, who is therefore hustled off to safety by Vera’s brother, Essex used-car dealer, Albert Ponson. Albert gets the teenage boy so drunk that his wife, Belinda, leaves him in disgust – locking their bungalow’s internal and external doors so securely that Albert has to call the police to get released with disastrous results, while Belinda drives the unconscious Esmond with her back to her ancestral home, the gloomy Grope Hall in remote Northumberland where – to the reader’s great surprise – they fall in love and live happily ever after.
2010 – The Wilt Inheritance – Sharpe’s last novel, the fifth and final instalment of the adventures of Polytechnic lecturer Henry Wilt, his naggy wife, Eva, and their appalling teenage daughters, all of whom end up at the grotesque Sandystones Hall in North Norfolk, where Wilt is engaged to tutor the lady of the manor’s psychotic teenage son, and Eva gets caught up in complications around burying dead Uncle Henry, whose body the quads steal from the coffin and hide in the woods with dire consequences that even they don’t anticipate.
Books & Boots 