The Throwback by Tom Sharpe (1978) continues his vein of aggressively crude and violent farce, often with hilarious results. As I read it I realised that, if the plots are designed to be convoluted and contrived and the characters grotesque and improbably naive or fiendish or weird, in order to bring about ludicrous scenes and situations, then it makes sense that the language used is similarly crude and extreme. The characters certainly f and blind with ease.
Plot
Old Flawse, 90-year-old owner of Flawse Hall in bleakest Northumberland, had a daughter who died giving birth to a bastard son during a hunt. The son is named Lockhart. Old Flawse hands the boy over to the gamekeeper Mr Dodd to be brought up in Puritan cleanliness of body and mind, dedicated to hunting on the moors. His doctor says he’s looking a bit peaky, so they both go on a cruise where they encounter calculating divorcée, Mrs Sandicott, whose husband has died leaving her with a dozen properties in Surrey, and a naive but stunning daughter, Jessica. The fortune-seeking Mrs Sandicott marries the old man, Lockhart marries Jessica, the old people maliciously calculating against each other, the young people ruinously naive about the realities of sex.
Back in Flawse Hall Old Flawse imposes a byzantine will on Mrs Sandicott by which she will inherit the hall but only on condition she never leave the house, never updates its ramshackle amenities etc. Though all these stipulations fall if young Lockhart can find his unknown father – and then thrash him within an inch of his life – whereupon he will inherit.
Meanwhile, young Lockhart moves in with his wife in Sandicott Close, East Pursley, Surrey and finds it very different from the wilds of Northumbria. He would very much like the money from selling the properties but finds himself constricted by modern tenancy agreements which mean the tenants of the 12 houses Jessica owns can’t be evicted. Ah, but they can be terrorised out of their properties – and this the bold huntsman proceeds to do, through a succession of evermore bizarre, violent, inflammatory and explosive techniques.
This goes on for some time, is very elaborate and very funny. Lockhart posts the two little old ladies in number 7 a variety of sex toys and a gigantic vibrating penis with realistic testicles, which they are unwrapping and wondering how to operate just as the vicar’s wife makes an impromptu visit and faints clear away, to come around to find herself on the kitchen table, being given the kiss of life by one old lady while the other approaches sinisterly with the gigantic penis – at which she leaps up and runs out of the house screaming: that gives a good flavour of the scenes. Another brilliant sequence is when Lockhart gives the retired Colonel’s bull-terrier LSD and it starts hallucinating prehistoric monsters everywhere, running round howling biting fences and telegraph poles and cars and policemen and fire engines before running off into the nearby bird sanctuary to cause untold mayhem…
Daily Mail
Old Flawse and young Lockhart share a dislike of officialdom and, in particular, the Taxman and the VAT man. One of the latter is mercilessly hounded and hospitalised (as he approaches Flawse Hall Dodd opens the sluices of the nearby reservoir which washes him, and his car, miles along the Fell.) The accumulated gripes about the government, the taxman, the corrupt ineffectiveness of bureaucracy, the collapse of our manufacturing economy, the collapse of the currency, the balance of payments deficit blah blah blah, begin to have the affect of being stuck at the bar with a drunk, middle-aged Daily Mail reader determined to go through his list of everything which is wrong with this blasted country, what.
Longeurs
The book is funny – outrageously, savagely, brutally, funny – but ultimately rather wearing. (There’s a lot less violence in the Anglo-Saxon poetry I’ve been reading recently.) Like a lot of Sharpe’s books, you’re quite exhausted by page 180, but it goes on to start up a whole new series of outrages, in this case, the approach of the VAT men to Flawse Hall which is interrupted because Lockhart has buried loads of loudspeakers across the moor, and made recordings of the nearby Army training exercises complete with shellfire and machine guns – which recordings he suddenly turns on at full blast leading the terrified men to think they’re in the middle of the Battle of the Somme, some falling to the ground and covering their ears, some jumping into the reservoir to escape the banshee wailing, some running away screaming.
Practical jokes
Farce as a genre is the Practical Joke transferred to the stage or page, crude physical humour designed to prompt explosive laughter. Pure farce is a narrative or text whose only concern is to hurry you on to the next practical joke, the next outrageous physical debacle.
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.
Pan paperback cover of The Throwback with illustration by Paul Sample
Credit
‘The Throwback’ by Tom Sharpe was published by Martin Secker and Warburg in 1978.
Books & Boots 