Keeping it up
Francis King
Wilt on High Tom Sharpe (Secker & Warburg £8.95) In retrospect, it may be seen as prophetic that Tom Sharpe's fifth novel should have been called Wilt. After the exuberant ejaculations of that work and its predeces- sors, there followed depressing indications that this author found it increasingly diffi- cult to keep it up. Now any hopes raised by the title Wilt on High are all too soon dashed. So far from Wilt being on high, he has reached a new low.
Wilt, for those unfamiliar with him, is on the staff of the Fenland College of Arts and Technology. His title of Head of Liberal Studies has now become Head of Com- munications Skills and Expressive Attain- ment (Mr Sharpe deals incisively with this kind of self-aggrandising gobbledygook), even if his pupils remain the same cloddish turners, fitters, plasterers and printers. His academic life is unexcitingly humdrum, except when, for the purpose of one of Mr Sharpe's novels about him, it is disrupted by some riotous and wholly unsought adventure, from which, after a succession of appalling embarrassments and humilia- tions, he eventually emerges triumphant. But his home life is prevented from ever being unexcitingly humdrum by the girl quads — 'the clones' or 'the bints', as he himself calls them — who have long since succeeded in making theirs the most hated and feared family in the neighbourhood. When not taking a relentless interest in such sex-life as takes place between their parents, these 11-year-old monsters in- dulge in such giggles as electrifying a fence, fusing all the lights in doing so, and tampering with a neighbour's mowing- machine so that, accelerating to 80 miles an hour, it races into his house and cuts a swathe through a deep-pile carpet.
The plot, which is certainly ingenious, is concerned with the manner in which Wilt becomes prime suspect in the course of a police enquiry into drug dealing. An over- dose of heroin causes the deaths, first of a girl student, daughter of the Lord Lieuten- ant of the county, at the College, and then of a gang-boss to whom Wilt has been giving classes in English Literature at the local gaol in which he has been incarcer- ated. A connection is established, and in no time at all an overzealous police-officer is giving directions for the wholly innocent Wilt to be kept under close surveillance. His house and car are bugged; and subse- quently it is the discovery of not one but two bugs bleeping away in his Ford Escort that arouses the suspicion of a security officer at the US airbase where he also lectures and leads to him being confined as a possible terrorist or spy.
Mr Sharpe's speciality is not human comedy but inhuman farce. It is a cold eye that he casts on the pitiful absurdities of existence and a rough hand with which he manipulates the puppets chosen to demon- strate those absurdities. Fortunately, he has here abandoned the cloacal obsession that in some of his other novels threatened to submerge everyone and everything under its malodorous tide. In its place, there is now an obsession with sexual performance, of the same kind that so often finds anguished expression on late- night phone-ins. Wilt's substantial wife Eva has a friend called Mavis, who is an enthusiast for the women's peace move- ment but not for letting her husband cut the mustard. As she puts it: 'In a sense the bomb is symbolic of the male orgasm. It's potency on a mass destruction level.' Mavis consults a sinister harpy of a doctor about her marital problem of supply and de- mand, and the doctor then supplies her with a hormone with which secretly to dose her husband. The result is that a once exuberant 41-year-old puts on weight, becomes lethargic and starts to grow breasts.
Eva, exasperated by the problem of too little, not too much, nooky, consults the same doctor, who provides an aphrodisiac. Ingested by Wilt in large quantities in the beer that Eva has used as the dilutant, it induces a priapism so extreme that his unavailing attempts to bring a prolonged erection even to half-mast lead him first to introduce cold cream into his penis with his wife's icing syringe and then to apply a restraining bandage and a cricketer's box before setting off for his lecture at the American airbase.
For me, all this is too gruesome • to be funny — as are the scenes involving the death of the girl student and the subse- quent discovery of her corpse in the Col- lege boiler-room. Since the boiler has been working, the presence of the corpse is all too perceptible; and, on learning of his bereavement, the girl's father keeps the news to himself until the excellent dinner that he is giving to the Home Secretary and two friends from the Foreign Office has run its full course — or courses.
Mr Sharpe is not a verbally exciting writer in the manner of P. G. Wodehouse or Peter de Vries. When he does attempt some verbal frolic, it is usually in the form of a double entendre of the kind that I have attempted, in a spirit of emulation, at the outset of this piece. Thus, a catering student at the College causes alarm by announcing that she has five buns in the oven, as does the head of the Catering Department by putting so much emphasis on faggots and queen's pudding in her monograph 'Dietetic Advances in Multi Phased Institutional Provisioning'. There Is a lot of that kind of thing. In this increasingly frenetic novel, Mr Sharpe reminds me of one of those im- mensely skilled directors of farce, a Ray Cooney or a Mike Ockrent, who devise for their players such a remarkable wealth of business that it takes the audience a long time to realise that the piece itself is whollY empty. Perhaps Mr Sharpe should noW write a serious novel. I have always been convinced that to achieve success in a serious novel is easier than in a comic one.
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