A Twenty-Year-Old Review of Porterhouse Blue

Here's more from my old blog. I still like Tom Sharpe (now RIP) though I haven't read him in a while. When I say I'm an anglophile, this is the kind of thing I mean-- quite apart from Shakespeare and Constable and all that.

Porterhouse Blue

Tom Sharpe

rating: 5/5

“To Skullion, emerging sleepily from the back room, the sight of the Dean in his dressing-gown holding the knotted end of an inflated contraceptive had about it a nightmare quality that deprived him of his limited amount of speech. He stood staring wildly-eyed at the Dean while on the corner of his vision the contraceptive wobbled obscenely”.

That’s pretty representative of a Tom Sharpe paragraph. Academics, incongruously buttoned-up prose and ludicrous situations are the order of the day. Of course, all farce is about contriving weird scenarios, but Sharpe does it so much more ingeniously than most. His plots are like Fawlty Towers scripts, taking relatively harmless elements and stirring them together to create spectacular explosions.

I made a happy discovery the other day; a load of Tom Sharpe books in The Secret Bookshop (which certainly lives up to its name, since I was only alerted to its existence that week), going at three euro apiece. I’m not going to review them all here, but since Porterhouse Blue is his most famous and the best I’ve read so far, it’s the obvious choice.

The funny thing about this book is, though I’d always loved the title, it made me a imagine a book that was pretty much the yin-yang opposite of Porterhouse Blue. I thought Porterhouse was some kind of alcoholic drink (I was only sixteen) and the title evoked a rich royal blue liquor in a shapely bottle; it had the timeless, tranquil air of a still life. I imagined it was a very staid and contemplative talky book about the human condition, possibly set at the height of the Victorian era, and containing a climactic scene where Penelope Carmichael has a moment of epiphany watching birds eating crumbs in the garden.

Porterhouse is actually a Cambridge college, the nadir of scholarship and the zenith of snobbery, and a Porterhouse Blue is a slang-term for a stroke brought on by the dons’ sybaritic lifestyle. (A blue ribbon, known as a blue for short, is awarded in Oxford and Cambridge for sporting achievement.) A former Porterhouse boy, a left-leaning politician, returns as Master to modernise the college, proposing female students and Fellows, contraceptive dispensers and a self-service canteen rather than the lavish kitchens the Fellows have enjoyed for centuries. There’s also a resident graduate student with a guilty lust for his horribly obese cleaning lady, a servile porter who will stop at nothing to uphold the current regime and a TV presenter who specialises in making documentaries about the passing of the good old days.

Sharpe’s view of human nature is jaundiced in the extreme– virtually everybody in his novels is motivated by some kind of spite, greed or perversion– but his temperament is basically reactionary. He doesn’t romanticise the past (the Fellows of the college and their titled and privileged past students are shown as stupid and callous) but his sting really comes out when he is aiming at the liberal left. Although he seems to hate modernism more for its philistinism and illiteracy than for any more social or political animus. (It’s nice to read Sharpe at one point– I can’t find the passage– describe somebody as being mad only in a figurative sense to mean angry rather than insane.)

His strongest suit is probably the description of his characters’ thought processes. Sharpe’s subject matter, bawdy farce, might lead you to think his books are written in the style of a Sun newspaper article, but nothing could be further from the truth. He is in fact a former academic himself, and not averse to literary name-dropping or giving an occasional flourish of scholarship.

For instance: “The image of Mrs Biggs, a cross between a cherubim in menopause and booted succubus, kept intruding. Zipser turned for escape to a book of photographs of starving children in Nagaland but in spite of this mental flagellation Mrs Biggs prevailed. He tried Hermitsch on Fall Out and the Andaman Islands and even Sterilization, Vasectomy and Abortion by Allard but these holy writs all failed against the pervasive fantasy of the bedder. It was as if his social conscience, his concern for the plight of humanity at large, the universal and collective pity he felt for all mankind, had been breached in some unspeakably personal way by the inveterate triviality and egoism of Mrs Biggs. Zipser, whose life had been filled with a truly impersonal charity– spent holidays from school working for SOBB, the Save Our Black Brothers campaign– and whose third worldiness was impeccable, found himself suddenly the victim of a sexual idiosyncrasy which made a mockery of his universalism”.

Another reason I like the seventies Pan editions of Sharpe’s books is so trivial I’m almost ashamed to mention it; I love the inky, compact typeface that they’re printed in. There’s something robust and earthy about it. Not enough attention is paid to typefaces. Does the meaning of a sentence subtly change from Times New Roman to Cooper Black? You know, I think it just might.