Tom's no longer Sharpe
Posted: Thu Jun 06, 2013 9:23 pm
Tom Sharpe, novelist, dies age 85
The novelist Tom Sharpe, known for his satirical farces such as Blott On The Landscape and the Wilt series, has died at the age of 85.
The writer, whose works had been adapted for TV, had major success with 16 books, although there were some lengthy gaps between them due to health problems.
He had been living in northern Spain for two decades, partly because he preferred the health care system. Spanish newspaper El Pais said today that he had died at his home in Llafranc in Catalonia, due to complications from diabetes.
Sharpe won huge acclaim for his books with The Times calling him "the funniest novelist writing today", although he did not publish his first, Riotous Assembly, until he was 43 in 1971.
Within a few years he had published his best known works Porterhouse Blue, Wilt and Blott On The Landscape.
Despite moving from Cambridge to Spain in the early 1990s, he had little interest in learning Spanish and kept a circle of English-speaking friends.
"I don't want to learn the language. I don't want to hear what the price of meat is," he said in an interview with an expat journal. And he spoke of how he was disenchanted with the UK: "It is so depressing. I can't bear it. There is no such thing as the English gentleman any more. Money rules everything."
After studying at Lancing College and Pembroke College, Cambridge, he served in the Marines before moving to South Africa in his early 20s, working as a social worker and teacher. He also had his own photographic studio.
However after ten years, in 1961, he was deported for criticising the apartheid regime and returned to the UK to lecture at Cambridge College of Arts and Technology, a period which helped to inspire his character Wilt, who featured in five novels.
Susan Sandon, managing director of his publisher Cornerstone, said: "Tom Sharpe was one of our greatest satirists and a brilliant writer: witty, often outrageous, always acutely funny about the absurdities of life.
"The private Tom was warm, supportive and wholly engaging. I feel enormously privileged to have been his publisher."
10 great Tom Sharpe quotes
1) The man who said the pen was mightier than the sword ought to have tried reading The Mill on the Floss to Motor Mechanics. (Wilt, 1976)
2) His had been an intellectual decision founded on his conviction that if a little knowledge was a dangerous thing, a lot was lethal. (Porterhouse Blue, 1974)
3) There's nothing I enjoy more than listening to a highly trained intelligence leapfrogging common sense and coming to the wrong conclusions. It gives me renewed faith in parliamentary democracy. (Wilt on High, 1984)
4) There’s nothing worse than an introspective drunk. (The Wilt Alternative, 1979)
5) I don’t want to learn the language. I don’t want to hear what the price of meat is. (Sharpe's response when asked if he had learnt Spanish. He moved to Llafranc in 2004).
6) I have yet to meet a liberal who can withstand the attrition of prolonged discussion of the unessentials. (Porterhouse Blue, 1974)
7) Grub Street, and proud of it. Where people write without hypocrisy for money. (The Great Pursuit, 1977)
8) I don't consider myself bald, I'm just taller than my hair.
9) What sort of books do you think the public are going to read if you don't give them what they want? (The Great Pursuit, 1977)
10) Dedication: The South African police force whose lives are dedicated to the preservation of western civilisation in southern Africa. (Sharpe's ironic dedication to Riotous Assembly, 1971, which criticised western attitudes in South Africa).
