Offering all the qualities of his general bestselling fiction, this is
Tom Sharpe's blazing satire of South African apartheid,
companion to Indecent Exposure.
The criteria for joining the S.A. police is, you have to have failed your
exams at school, be psychotic and be completely devoid of any compassion.
I look forward to reading the rest of Tom's books, but feel they will not
live up to the two I have picked out.
Offering all the qualities of his general bestselling fiction, this is Tom Sharpe's blazing satire of South
African apartheid, companion to Riotous Assembly.
Porterhouse Blue is the story of one college campus with more problems than students.
A revolution at Porterhouse College sends a lot of things out in the open,
namely one gross of condoms.
In Blott on the Landscape, the landscape is flawless until Sir Giles, man of few principles and curious
tastes, plots to build a highway smack through it. Sir Giles recruits to his side Hoskins, a corrupt local
official; Lord Leakham, the environmental equivalent of a hanging judge; and Dundridge, a
troublesome bureaucrat with an unhealthy passion for order. Pitted against this powerful lobby are a
mere handful of local residents led by his wife. Sharpe spells out in riotous detail how the forces of
virtue play an exceedingly dirty game when the issue is close to home. The reissue of this explosively
comic novel will gladden the heart of everyone who has ever confronted a beaurocrat.
Humble professor of a technical college by day, Henry Wilt at night is often drunk on alcohol and fantasies of killing his idiotic, impressionable wife.
In Wilt, Sharpe has created a pathetic mouse of a man, Henry Wilt, who for ten years has taught literature to under-appreciative, over-aged boors at the local college. Tired of the constant bullying at the hands of his hefty, obsessive-compulsive wife, Eva, he finds himself gleefully fantasizing about murdering her. When Eva runs off with a visiting biochemistry professor and his nymphomaniacal wife, Wilt begins to practice her eventual demise by dumping a life-size blow-up doll, wearing Eva's clothes and wig, down a 30-foot shaft. Inevitably and uproariously everything goes wrong as Wilt is accused of murder and mayhem ensues in this delicious and scathing comedic satire.
Two stars of the hit British TV series Alas Smith and Jones are featured in this silly farce
about college lecturer Henry Wilt (Rhys-Jones), who hates his bitchy wife
and becomes the prime suspect when the police think she's been murdered.
Smith is the twit of an inspector assigned to the case. Funny if it hits you in the right mood.
Based on Tom Sharpe's best-seller. Original British title: WILT.
(This video is in NTSC format used US and Canada)
(Andy Crome)
First meet young Lockhart Flawse from Flawse Hall on Flawse Fell.
Then hear his story of gassing, whipping, blowing up,
killing and stuffing - in fact, the everyday tale of a
wild child of nature plunged into the genteel mock-Tudor world of surburban Surrey.
I have been reading Sharpe for twenty five years and this is, if not the absolute best of his books,
certainly the funniest and most completely anarchic. One can not help admire the protagonist who
through no fault of his own has no outlet in the modern world for his undoubted abilities. All of us
have at some time aspired to unfettered control of our destinies but are content to allow society to
dictate the standards by which we operate. No such petty concerns trouble the throwback - he will
by fair means or foul, secure his home and his family. I can only admire him, and hope that he truly
exists, in his Northumbrian fastness, daring the revenue man to cross his threshold. There's a lesson
here, couched in some of the most hilarious writing since Mein Kampf."
(a reader from Boston)
The Wilt Alternative
A novel which continues the saga of Henry Wilt, an innate coward and hen-pecked
husband whose escapades include a drunken (and very painful) battle with a rosebush,
an all-consuming infatuation with an overseas student, and becoming an unwilling participant in an armed siege.
Ancestral Vices
It is the proud claim of the Petrefacts that theirs is one of the oldest and most
obscure families in England. They have kept their heads by not raising them above
the Vale of Bushampton. Even Samuel Petrefact's enormous success as an
industrialist in the nineteenth century and the ostentation of his Edwardian
successors did not break entirely with this tradition. But the elevation of
Ronald Osprey Petrefact to the peerage suddenly threatens that obscurity; when,
to annoy his relatives (and to serve other more commercial ends), Lord Petrefact
engages Walden Yapp, Professor of Demotic Historiography at KIoone University,
to write the family history, his relatives are up in arms. The guardian of the
Petrefact tradition, Miss Emmelia, musters the family eccentrics to meet
the threat -only to discover that Frederick, her disinherited nephew, has put
more than the family name in jeopardy. Walden Yapp too has problems,
of a sexual nature, as much at variance with his puritanical and political
upbringing as Lord Petrefact is with the rest of his relatives.
Yapp's search for the truth leads him from the intricacies of Victorian domestic
plumbing through the arms of his witless landlady into those of the police - and
out again.
This insensitive and deeply perceptive novel reveals the common heritage
which has bound English society in fragments through the centuries.
The burbling note of a 1927 Bentley vibrates through the cypress-lined lanes of
France as the car hurtles southwards to the rescue of a lady in distress.
Can this be the return of the balmy days before the recent conflict?
Not quite, for the Bentley is following a trail laid by a battered Cortina,
and the lady in distress has in her time been no better than she should
be - indeed she does not yet know that she is in distress.
But at the wheel of the Bentley sits the monocled Glodstone, eccentric
housemaster with a fixation on fiction of the Bulldog Drummond school.
Worse, Glodstone's passenger is his impressionable pupil Peregrine,
a natural athlete and crack shot equipped with an alarming tendency to
take instructions literally.
There is a surprise or two in store for Glodstone: the route he has taken
leaves behind a trail of chaos, but the road ahead leads in a
straight line to mayhem.
Wilt is back - in form, and in a deal of trouble.
Wilt is still teaching at the Fenland Tech, attempting to drill English into
Plasterers, dozing through tedious committee meetings and occasionally getting
mildly plastered in "The Pig in A Poke" with one of his few bearable colleagues.
But the even tenor of his days is very rudely interrupted when the shadow
of drug dealing flickers across the Tech.
Suddenly Wilt becomes the target of suspicion. His colleagues think that he's
responsible for triggering a departmental inquiry, and Inspector Flint - an old
enemy - knows that he's guilty of something, and sees a chance to settle a number
of scores. What his wife thinks is... what all wives think. But what none of
them have reckoned with is Wilt's talent for making new enemies.
What starts with an accusation of voyeurism in the staff lavatory (of the wrong
gender) leads, more or less directly, to a massive confrontation at a nearby
US airbase with the forces of law and order on both sides and Wilt in his usual
place - in the middle.
There are bugging devices implanted in his car: his formidable wife is in touch
with a sinister herbalist. The Wilt quads are deploying to the full their talents
for infuriating his neighbours, and Wilt himself is the target for experienced
and underworked inquisitors - some from the police, some from the USAF.
There is only one way out: straight up.
Grantchester Grind
It is crisis time again at Porterhouse, where crises never come in singles.
The formidable Skullion is showing signs of frailty - he tends to have difficulty
with his second case of Hardy's twenty-year-old Special of an evening - and the
tricky business of appointing a new Master has to begin again. Meanwhile the
college's monstrous debts refuse to go away, and a sinister American seems
determined to make a television film on the premises. And if there is trouble
ahead there is also trouble behind: the widow of the previous Master is
convinced her husband was murdered, and - at a price - she plants an agent
in the Senior Common room to dig up an unpleasant truth that everyone else
would much rather leave under the carpet.
The instinct of the true Porterhouse man faced with a crisis is to reach for
the bottle. Then to fall back on the subtle tactical skills honed at Cambridge
down the centuries - blackmail and kidnap for choice. But will these be enough?
Menaced on all sides - by the collapse of the Chapel, by the tentacles of
organised crime (and a finger or two closer to home), and by the hovering
threat of the abominable Dog's Nose Man - will Porterhouse be forced to unleash
the most fearsome weapon in its armoury, the college food?
Timothy Bright doesn't exactly live up to his name. He is the not-very acute scion of a successful
family - that is, until Timothy has his funds cut off. This sad turn of affairs gives him the desire,
although unfortunately not the brains, to get rich on his own. In this devil-may-care way, Tom Sharpe
subjects his poor hero to run-ins with the Chief Constable, his wife, her alluring and jealous lesbian
lover - and Miss Marjorie Midden. All converge at the rambling manor house Middenhall -
nicknamed "The Midden" - in a frenetic finale with, among other things, policemen disguised as sheep
and a mad aunt in a silver cat suit.
(The New York Times Book Review, Liam Callanan)
Henry Wilt is back.
This time he is pitted against the vices of an aristocratic pervert, the merciless greed, of a
politician's wife and the seedy underbelly of Britain's medical facilities, deftly exposing the
farcical realities of small-town England and America.
(Amazon review)
A collection of the books Wilt, Wilt Alternative en Wilt on High !
Of course you can buy books there, but you will also find information about the books, the writer and (readers) reviews.
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