Look Sharpe

Stan Gebler Davies

Krippendorf's Tribe Frank Parkin (Collins £7.95) Beef Wellington Blue Max Davidson (Heinemann £8.95)

Since Tom Sharpe has taken to imitating himself, it is unnecessary that others should do likewise. Nevertheless, the school of Sharpe emerges as a blot on the literary landscape. It is rather a pity, really, but quite inevitable that once a writer has devised a style so successful that his books sell in the millions, hundreds will ape him. Long since remaindered and pulped are the imitators of Evelyn Waugh. No one happily copied Swift or Sheridan (not even Boucicault) or Dryden or Pope (not even Clive James), and if there is an inheritor to Mann O'Brien I do not know his name. When a writer has a mind to be satirical, it had better be his own mind.

There is an apparent simplicity to Sharpe's plots which must be beguiling to would-be imitators: it is that every last damn thing which could not conceivably happen, does happen. To essay sexual intercourse under any circumstance is to hazard one's private parts. To turn on the tap in a bathroom is to invite an explosion and to flush the toilet is to bring fire and fl. ood down upon the whole town. If there is a polytechnic in the first chapter, it is bound to be occupied by revolutionaries in

the second and blown up in the third.

In order for the formula to work to comic effect, it is necessary that the victims should be utterly innocent, thereby de- monstrating the awful malignancy of humankind and the nonchalance of God (a la Voltaire), or else thoroughly unpleasant, in which case one appreciates their come- uppance. Frank Parkin has got this for- mula only half-right, for all of his charac- ters are malignant and the most evil of them all, his hero Krippendorf, gets away with no more punishment than a passing

dose of the clap. • The first half of the book works very well. Krippendorf, an anthropologist so incompetent that he addresses the working classes in polysyllables in the belief that they will understand him, is engaged in the composition of a monograph on the subject of an Amazonian tribe whose acquaintance he has not been able to make because he has squandered his research grant on frip- peries like a new Volvo. In the absence of his wife, a television reporter who roams the world recording revolutions and the executions attendant to them, he is re- quired to look after his three children.

These are: a small boy who is interested only in the ingestion of food but cannot get it past his face; a larger boy who manufac- tures napalm and squirts it onto cats with his bicycle-pump; and their pubescent sis- ter, a punk who beats the smaller boy for stealing the batteries from her vibrator.

Krippendorf, pressed for concrete re- sults by the research foundation which has given him the squandered money, invents bogus behaviour for them, using as models his atrocious children and himself. When it takes off, it is very funny. Here is a passage on the tribal language he invents:

In Shelmikedmu the terms 'yes' and `no' are not differentiated at the verbal level; the selfsame word prhxqo is used to denote both expressions. This does not, however, result in any confusion or ambiguity because the utter- ance of the word prhxqo is always accompa- nied by a bodily gesture that renders its meaning clear. If the speaker wishes to give the word a negative connotation he draws his upper lip over his teeth while saying it, at the same time dilating his nostrils and rolling his eyes in a clockwise direction. If he wishes to give the word a positive meaning he thrusts his tongue into his lower lip while forcing his chin into his chest.

The contemporary background is also excellently done. The author, who is Tutor and Fellow in Politics at Magdalen, has taken the collapse of the socialist-welfare- trade-union state a little beyond the point it had reached in 1979, before the happy intercession of Blessed Margaret, and im- agined food riots, pension riots, trigger- happy police and televised hangings. I should imagine these passages, and those dealing with sex(well-observed, frightful; Krippendorf, on the job, notices that he is shedding dandruff onto the dark skin of the Filipino lady he is servicing), will greatly please vindictive and dirty-minded Tories, if there are any such creatures.

It is the second half of the book which goes wrong when it goes over the top. No longer are the imaginary Amazonians based on the children but the children are made increasingly to conform to a B-movie stereotype of jungle savagery, and at their father's direction take to incest and canni- balism. (Eating people is not necessarily funny.) This constitutes the happy ending.

Mr Parkin has an acute comic gift, and he will do very well for himself when he decides to do his own thing.

The hero of Mr Davidson's novel is a fat lobby correspondent suffering from a ter- minal case of the cynicism which is not so much a consequence of the practice of journalism as a necessary qualification for entry into it in the first place. The author has such an intimate knowledge of the corridors of boredom that he must have served time himself as a Palace hack, but the biographical blurb, as is lately the fashion, does not tell us anything about him beyond the fact that he has written another novel and is still a young man.

His hero is sympathetic in rather a horrible way and quite aware that he lies and cheats more than is strictly necessary in order to indulge public curiosity about the affairs of ministers and other matters of moment. He thinks he can pin a murder on a cabinet minister and get half a million for his pains. He almost succeeds, with the assistance of the minister's scorned doxy. There is a lively cinematic ending on the floor (literally) of the Commons.

It is an excellent, workmanlike novel. I cannot think why it has got a Tom Sharpe title and a drawing on the cover which is reminiscent of the illustrations that usually go with Sharpe, unless of course to bam- boozle the customers.