Between Porterhouse Blue (1974) and Wilt (1976) Sharpe published Blott on the Landscape (1975). For some reason I found this funnier than the other two, maybe because I’m getting a feel for a Sharpe novel, what it does and does not try to do. In particular, a feel for the genre of Farce:
‘Farce – a comic dramatic piece that uses highly improbable situations, stereotyped characters, extravagant exaggeration, and violent horseplay… Farce is generally regarded as intellectually and aesthetically inferior to comedy in its crude characterizations and implausible plots.’ (Encyclopedia Britannica)
Plot
Sir Giles Lynchwood, MP for the fictional constituency of South Worfordshire, hates his fat wife, Lady Maud, and is casting round for a way to leave her but without initiating a divorce – which would mean he loses the riches she brought to the marriage. He stumbles upon the idea of getting a motorway extension driven through her Family Seat, the home they both share, Handyman Hall – as husband he would get the substantial compensation the government would pay and Lady Maud wouldn’t get a thing. Perfect! However, having pulled the necessary strings in Whitehall to get the ball rolling, he makes every effort to appear to his wife and the local gentry to be leading the campaign against it, a feat of Machiavellian hypocrisy.
Thus starts a farcical sequence of events drawing in:
- a senior judge tasked with running the public enquiry who is stoned and bottled out of town by the yokels of Worford – easily bought by Lady Maud with gallons of free beer
- a naive man from the Ministry, Dundridge, who is swiftly made drunk at a local golf club party and photographed in compromising positions with an obliging local beauty, leading to contorted blackmail schemes as the photos change hands
- the eponymous Blott, a German Prisoner of War who managed to stay on after the War as the gardener at Handyman Hall and who Lady Maud tasks with spying on Sir Giles and his mistress in London
- Mrs Forsyth, the mistress in London, who is paid to (reluctantly) tie up Sir Giles in a variety of bondage outfits
and much, much more. We witness:
- Blott getting the motorway demolition men drunk, especially the one in charge of the wrecking ball who he persuades to show off his skill and ends up inadvertently demolishing half of Worford High Street and setting on fire a row of historic almshouses.
- Blott digs up his stash of World War Two weapons and transforms the triumphal arch-cum-lodge where he lives into a fortress, filling it with concrete, ringing it with barbed wire, from which he holds off both the local police and the Army with machine guns and rocket launchers.
So sucked are you into the crazy logic of Sharpeland that you accept it when Lady Maud gets the Hall converted into a safari park in seven days flat, so that when a tipsy Sir Giles returns from a sojourn in London he is surprised to find his home surrounded by a barbed wire fence and, once he has broken in, very surprised to encounter real-life lions in his rose garden. Hungry lions.
Farcical stereotypes
- the fat sexually voracious woman (here, Lady Maud; Porterhouse Blue Mrs Biggs; Wilt Eva Wilt)
- her ineffectual male victim (here, Dundridge; Porterhouse Blue Lionel Zipser; Wilt Henry Wilt)
- the Machiavellian committee man (here, Sir Giles Lynchwood; Porterhouse Blue Sir Godber Evans; Wilt Dr Board)
- the Neanderthal but obstinate prole (Skullion, Blott)
- the obtuse police (here, Henry Percival; Wilt Inspector Flint)
- the inadequate Army
Sex farce
The English are embarrassed by sex (well, the polite English middle classes are). Hence all those Whitehall Farces with titles like Run For Your Wife and Whoops, There Go My Trousers! Once you accept these novels as farce, it is easier to accept the multitude of excruciatingly embarrassing scenes which the plot generates. Thus the completely sexless nature of Sir Giles and Lady Maud’s marriage drives them both into farcical mishaps with other partners, Sir Giles into the chains and straps of Mrs Forsyth in St John’s Wood, Lady Maud into the hilarious attempt to seduce Dundridge. Both Dundridge and Sir Giles are stripped naked and photographed at their most abjectly humiliated. Something very Freudian going on with this humour.
Bureaucracy
There is also something intrinsically farcical about bureaucracy, which so often fails or results in the opposite of what was intended. (When Kafka read his great novels about bureaucracy to his friends there were, apparently, tears of laughter running down his face.) Thus Sir Giles’ cunning plan to route a motorway through his own property for the compensation money drags in the Ministry of Transport, with its hierarchy of twitchy civil servants, each devoted to protecting their own backs right up to Cabinet level. Although it’s from a different era the accumulated nitwittery of the men from the Ministry reminded me of the wretched civil servants who have to cope with the girls of St Trinians (books 1948-53; films 1954-60).
Compulsory purchases
This kind of fuss about a proposed bypass or motorway seems rather dated. The protests about the extension of the A30 which led Swampy to prominence were in the 1990s. I think it was during the 1970s that this kind of protest first became widespread, as the government hugely expanded the motorway and A-road network. The entire premise of The HitchHiker’s Guide To The Galaxy is that Arthur Dent’s protest about his house being knocked down to make way for a town bypass is ironically mirrored by the entire planet being demolished to make way for a galactic bypass. That was broadcast in 1978, presumably written in 1976 or 77 ie the same time as his novel.
Prose style
I love Sharpe’s prose. It is clear and unconvoluted. It is made up of crisp sentences which clearly describe the concatenations of cataclysmic actions and schemes. There is as much description of place as is required to locate the narrative’s hopeless puppets. The comic plot fits together like a Swiss clock, all the interlocking pieces immaculately clean and precise. In this scene Dundridge has been reluctantly forced to seek shelter for the night at the home of the sexually voracious Lady Maud. He thinks he has managed to be given a room of his own, but…
Dundridge went across to the window and opened it and then, moving carefully so as not to stub his toes, he went back and got into bed. As he did so he knew there was something terribly wrong. A blast of Chanel No.5 issued from the bedclothes overpoweringly. So did Lady Maud. Her arms closed around him and with a husky, ‘Oh you wicked boy,’ her mouth descended on his. The next moment Dundridge was engulfed. Things seemed to fold round him, huge hot terrible things, legs, arms, breasts, lips, noses, thighs, bearing him up, entwining him, and bearing him down again in a frenzy of importunate flesh. He floundered frantically while the waves of Lady Maud’s mistaken response broke over him. (Page 110)
The novel is like a series of Donald McGill postcards come to life, bawdy, crude, brilliantly inventive, wonderfully funny. Speaking of illustrations…
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.
In the one below you can see the ferocious Lady Maud dominating the image, sprinkled with the incriminating blackmail photos of Dundridge, a rhinoceros horn peaking out form her left buttock and the buildings of Worford being demolished at top left.
Pan paperback cover of Blott On The Landscape – illustration by Paul Sample
Credit
‘Blott On The Landscape’ by Tom Sharpe was published by Secker and Warburg in 1975. Page references are to the 1977 Pan paperback edition. All quotations are used for the purpose of criticism and review.
Books & Boots 