Insanity could, with the help of modern medicine, be cured but dead dwarves were beyond any form of aid.
(Ancestral Vices, p.137)
This is the first Tom Sharpe novel I’ve read which I didn’t find funny. Grotesque, yes, but it lacked the compelling (il-)logic of the previous novels.
Plot summary
Lord Petrefact is a wicked old capitalist mill owner, confined to a wheelchair, and whose main pleasure in life is abusing his personal assistant Croxley. He hates his family and (for no very compelling reason that I could see) decides to commission a priggish, unimaginative, left-wing academic historian to write a warts-and-all history of the family’s long achievements of exploitation and abuse, venomously hoping it will drag in and humiliate as many of his relatives as possible.
And so we are (rather randomly) introduced to the University of Kloone, with the brand new computer Lord Petrefact has gifted to it (nicknamed ‘Doris’), and the impenetrably jargon-ridden and high-minded Marxist academic, Walden Yapp, the wholly unsuitable economic historian to whom Lord Petrefact offers a fortune to write the scandalous family story.
Fiasco at Fawcett Hall
Petrefact invites Yapp to his country seat, Fawcett Hall, where he insists on serving an eight-course dinner to revolt the puritanical socialist. There is a lot of fuss about his request for a sucking (or suckling ie very young) pig, traditionally cooked whole and presented with an apple in its mouth. When the local butcher can only get hold of a mature boar, Croxley and the Italian chef conspire to cut away most of the body and serve the head and rear end (grotesquely) sewed together.
At the end of the meal Yapp is shown to an ancient bedroom (where the wicked colonialist King Leopold of Belgium once stayed – to provoke the left-wing academic). But when Yapp tries out the very old shower / bath it goes mad, spraying water in every direction, rocking, shaking and eventually smashing its way through the floor – causing lumps of plaster to fall onto Lord Petrefact’s electric wheelchair in the bedroom below, which promptly goes haywire, charging around the room, smashing priceless vases etc before tangling up in Lord P’s pyjama cords and dragging him out into the hall and down the stairs, screaming for help.
The petrified housekeeper calls the police and we have a familiar-feeling scene of a perplexed copper being shown round the wrecked bedroom, bathroom and bloodstained hallway, jumping to all the wrong conclusions – reminiscent of the idiotic coppers in Sharpe’s first two South African novels and the exasperated Inspector Flint who appears in the Wilt novels. There is a running gag about the sucking pig, with the Italian chef giving the dim copper the impression Lord P used it for sexual perversions, as its name rudely suggests.
This all seemed to me very laboured, without the fresh, outrageous verve and the demented logic of the earlier books.
In the midst of this mayhem Yapp signs an amazingly generous contract with Lord P to produce a full economic history of the family and is sent off to the small town of Buscott in the Midlands, there to start work researching the cotton mill where the family fortunes all began. Lord P rubs his hands with glee at the thought that Yapp will discomfort and hopefully humiliate his son, Frederick, and his spinster sister, Emmelia, who both live in Buscott.
Buscott
In Buscott Yapp finds himself advised to board with a certain Mr and Mrs Coppett. She is a simple-minded, buxom woman who has been told by an idiotic marriage guidance counsellor to get a bit of extra sex. Which explains why she crudely tries to seduce Yapp who rejects her obviously imbecile initial advances but then finds himself, when alone, or alone with her, reluctantly aroused by her. Her husband is Willy Coppett (presumably a joke name – ‘will he cop it?’ ie die), a dwarf who works in the local abattoir and carries a wicked-looking ten-inch blade everywhere with him.
Yapp has come to research the history of the Petrefact mill in the town, expecting to find it cruelly exploiting a down-trodden workforce, but is disconcerted to find the town prosperous and the inhabitants all very happy. This is rather crude satire on the fatuousness of left-wing academics’ stereotyped expectations. The reason for the workforce’s contentment is that Lord P’s wayward son, Frederick, has turned the factory into a very successful manufacturer of sex toys and erotic lingerie, which makes good profits and pays its employees well.
(There is a sequence where rather sheltered spinster Miss Emmelia Petrefact, insisting on seeing her nephew, ends up blundering through the factory floor witnessing all kinds of sex aids being assembled, including the lifelike veins being painted onto plastic penises: somehow this doesn’t feel as transgressive, shocking or outrageous as the same kind of thing did in earlier novels. Maybe this reader has become a bit too blasé.)
Frederick pays Willy the dwarf to tail Yapp as Yapp tours the pubs of Buscott trying to find the alienated and radical proletariat his left-wing textbooks tell him about, but instead finding a pretty contented and well-paid workforce. Presumably this is satire on the shallow ignorance of left-wingers.
After giving Mrs Coppett a lift home one evening and receiving a thank you kiss, Yapp has to go out for another spin because he has had a spontaneous ’emission’ brought about by her proximity. He parks on the hard shoulder of a main road and slips through bushes into a nearby wood to take his semen-stained pants off. Meanwhile, Willy the dwarf has got drunk tailing Yapp round the town’s pubs and, on the way home, slips and drops his precious knife into the road. Clambering into the road to reclaim it he is promptly squashed flat by a tractor being driven without lights by a drunken farmer. Oops.
Terrified at killing the town’s favourite dwarf, the farmer picks up the mangled corpse, tiptoes back to an abandoned car he saw parked a bit further up the road, and slips the corpse, wrapped in farm cloth, into the boot. It is Yapp’s car.
The trial of Walden Yapp
The truth about the dead dwarf; the truth about the porn factory; Mrs Coppett’s lust, Yapp’s shame, the dim police, Lord Petrefact’s revenge – the scene is set for another hundred pages of farcical revelations and tangled imbroglios and it should all have been very funny – I certainly found loads of passages in Sharpe’s previous novels howlingly funny. But not this one.
Instead I was surprised that the comic potential of the porn factory and opportunities to satirise Yapp’s trendy lefty views were all pushed to one side as the narrative (in an eerie copy of Wilt) instead turns to focus on the arrest and lengthy interrogation of Yapp for the murder of Coppett. We know it was not murder and that Yapp didn’t commit it, but all the circumstances conspire to make him look guilty of (just as circumstances conspire to convince the police of Wilt’s guilt) and the novel now sets itself to submit him to the full indignities and absurdities of the British legal system.
Even Lord Petrefact’s plan for a candid history about the family – the starter motor for the whole novel – is more or less forgotten as the narrative zeroes in on Yapp’s trial, overseen by a crusty old judge who is a relative of the Petrefacts’ so that the whole thing becomes a predictably farcical fiasco.
And then the book develops in a wholly unexpected way as the hitherto fairly minor character of the elderly Emmelia Petrefact has a supposedly life-changing realisation. Attending a family gathering where they all agree the best thing is for Yapp to be locked away before he can write anything incriminating, and then watching Yapp being railroaded at his trial, Miss Emmelia comes to realise that she is a smug, rich, protected old lady, that Yapp is innocent, and that she ought to do something about it.
For the first time she glimpsed a world beyond the pale of wealth and privilege where people were poor and innocent for no good reason and others rich and evil for even worse… (p.198)
Simultaneously Yapp in prison, buggered and abused by his tough cell-mates for being a dwarf-molester, realises his whole life has been an intellectual lie: if there is no Historical Inevitability about the coming Communist Revolution, if Capitalist Society isn’t one great Conspiracy run by the Ruling Classes with the Police and others as their Parasites – then maybe the world just is meaninglessly chaotic and unpredictable.
Without a conspiracy to sustain him there was no rhyme or reason for his predicament, no certain social progress or historical force in whose service he was now suffering. Instead he was the victim of a random and chaotic set of circumstances beyond his powers of explanation. For the first time in his life Yapp felt himself to be alone in a menacing universe. (p.195)
This universal theme and the development of these two characters are almost serious; Sharpe is in danger of almost treating them as proper human beings – a significant and odd break from Sharpe’s glorious universe of freaks, grotesques and wild improbabilities…
True, Emmelia’s solution to Yapp’s dilemma is to put on a disguise and kidnap other dwarves in a bid to show that the dwarf-killer who topped Coppett is still at large and therefore can’t be Yapp – a strategy which results in a further concatenation of farcical consequences… But it feels forced: the real power comes from this odd eruption of real feeling into the narrative and lingers after you’ve finished the book.
In the end Yapp is released, a much changed man, widowed Mrs Coppett goes to live contentedly with Emmelia, and the narrative winds up in a happy, if rather disconcerting, ending.
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 below focuses on the priggish figure of Walden Yapp, with the vengeful wheelchair-bound Lord Petrefact receiving the sewn-together sucking pig on the left, a cameo of Yapp struggling with the shower at Fawcett Hall in the top left window, the Buscott Mill producing its sex shop accessories in centre top, the alluring figure of the retarded Mrs Coppett and, by Yapp’s right foot, the tiny figure of the dwarf, Willy Coppett, red with blood from the abattoir and carrying his little dagger.
Pan paperback edition of Ancestral Vices showing the cover illustration by Paul Sample
Credit
‘Ancestral Vices’ by Tom Sharpe was published by Martin Secker and Warburg in 1980. Page references are to the 1982 Pan paperback edition. All quotations are used for the purpose of criticism and review.
Books & Boots 