Wilt by Tom Sharpe
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Better Late Than Never

Scatological sarcasm is a Sharpe speciality. In Porterhouse Blue he uses it to parody Oxbridge tradition. Wilt goes for the jugular of California-chic, a somewhat more recent tradition inserting itself into British life during the 1970’s.

Being in a somewhat sheltered environment in the 70’s educational-wise, as Wilt’s wife Eva might say (I spent most of that period on a ship at sea or in the semi-dream state of a married graduate student), I missed a great deal of the development in popular culture. The mere fact that I had never read Sharpe suggests my naive isolation. This gap had potentially serious life-consequences.

Among other things I was entirely unprepared for the revolution in sexual mores going on in the world entirely without me. I was Philip Larkin in reverse, stuck happily before the Beatles album in 1963. Only decades later did I encounter people like Sharpe’s Prigsheims who inhabit an alternative universe of casual guile, equally casual promiscuity and of such exotic self-certainty that they are all but irresistible to anyone but a Wilt-like nebbish (whom I undoubtedly resembled).

I survived the experience more or less whole, but only with some considerable emotional confusion. It strikes me that contemporary fictional commentary like Sharpe’s, which articulates and sends up the latest behavioural fashions, would have been awfully helpful as therapy both before and after such events - if only to provide some reassurance of one’s sanity. Farce, it seems to me, makes a real contribution to what’s come to be called Continuing Education.

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