Steve Evans's Blog: The written world - Posts Tagged "tom-sharpe"

Or something like wit. This is the 23d post of this blog which is mostly about writing.

When I'm feeling defensive, which is not seldom, I say that my writing has "a serious purpose in a frivolous genre". I mean that, but it would be possible to say that thrillers aren't "frivolous" in any but a "not truly literature" sense. After all, they deal with death, with intrigue, with crime and sex, and those are pretty serious topics. What people mean when they say the genre is frivolous is only that the plots, and the characters are "stock" and fit into a formula, a format, that is shared with other thrillers.

There are other frivolous ways of being serious however - take Tom Sharpe.

For those unaware of him, Sharpe is an English satirical novelist; he manages to be viciously funny with an underlying serious intent, and because his novels are comic novels they are "by definition" frivolous. His first two novels were set in apartheid South Africa - he had been deported for "sedition" - and hilariously pull the regime to pieces. Some people say these were his best two books, but my favourite is The Great Pursuit, a novel that takes the stick to pretentious literary analysis and criticism of the F R Leavis variety. Possibly Sharpe was irked at not being taken seriously - if so, I understand that completely.

Well, whether he is a great novelist or not, Sharpe can be pretty funny. I'm envious of this wonderful talent that has an entirely different way of going about being "serious in a frivolous genre" than I have. I keep saying to myself that I should write a witty book, whether or not it comes up to the Sharpe edge of things, or has a different way of expressing what I have to say. But so far - I haven't. And Kaos, the book I'm working on now, doesn't seem to be making much room for the odd laugh. I'd like it to do that, but I find that sitting down and thinking up funny is entirely different from just being funny. The context of wit makes wit witty, and when I'm writing a novel, that context is usually not there.

Of course there are ways of going about this, and maybe that's what I'm trying to get at: just dropping the way I do things now, and adopting those ways. Raymond Chandler's advice in writing was "analyse, and emulate" and if one reads his books in that light, it is possible to see the emulation, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. Having influences is fine - writers and other artists don't just create out of their heads; they live in a society and respond to what is around them, and other writers are among what is "around them". Tracing that interaction is part of the joy of understanding them. Shakespeare had a huge range of influences and sometimes more or less copied them - he put slabs of Plutarch's Parallel Lives in the North translation into his plays, just rendering them into blank verse from prose. He did the same with Holinshed's Chronicles. Yet somehow the copy outshone the original...Shakespeare couldn't be pinned down. He could write it sad, he could write it mad and bad, he could make you smile. It is not easy to defy categorisation in this way as J K Rowling is finding out.

Where was I? Oh, yes, funny. The Russian writer Gogol supposedly said that he laughed so he wouldn't cry - the Russia of his time being a pretty depressing place. As a teenager I loved his short story about a nose that left its owner (who'd complained because there was pimple on it) chasing it round as it leapt from face to face. How I laughed! But there was more to this than a teenager might have noticed, that a writer a few years on does: that nose's journey revealed Russians, Russia, real life masquerading as absurd, and while the nose raced around its catalogue of faces, the censor was avoided...

Well, Gogol even as a humorist was treated as a serious writer. Sharpe is not. My sex thrills and chills romps are not either.

I set out to write thrillers as a means of writing about serious subjects for people who don't usually read books with serious subjects in mind. I took this cue from er Shakespeare actually, who put bums on seats with tales of bloodlust, lust, intrigue, laughter, nastiness, wit, broad humour, and more. People paid the price of admission to have a good time, and they got it. Shakespeare was competing not just against other dramatists for the public's shilling, but bear-baiting and similar amusements. He had to deliver, and he did.

Nowadays he is regarded as an untouchable icon but in his own time he was feted - by Francis Meres for example - because he could do what I would like to do: deliver serious themes in "frivolous" dress. Others were writing "serious" at the time, aimed only at the educated classes. Shakespeare showed he could do it with his sonnets. But what we remember him for was in principle always accessible by anyone.

That's the attraction of humorous writing to me too: that you can treat quite serious, even complex, subjects, in ways that are accessible to people who wouldn't want to know otherwise.

Ben Elton has written a number of books like this, but unlike Sharpe, I think his books - the ones I've read - are failures. They betray their seriousness too much, and end up not being really funny. Then the focus is on the argument, and the argument can't be as well-put as a non-fiction argument, and it's just a bore anyway. Sorry, Ben. Fiction needs to affect to be convincing, not convince to be effective. There are (non-humorous) exceptions to this, at least in their own time - Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward is perhaps the most notable, though a contemporary novel of the type is The Celestine Prophecy, a book I have never been able to bring myself to read.

So as I struggle away on Kaos, a book that is too serious by half, I would like to put some humour into it, to make people smile and even laugh. It would be nice to do that. But underlying that always, my "serious purpose in a frivolous genre".

If you've got this far give yourself a treat...go to the fridge, check it out, have a snack...or do a wee dance of the sort you would like to do when no one is looking...a true Fonteyn or Nureyev! Thanks for reading.

Not too long ago (October last year) I wrote a post about wit, and mentioned Tom Sharpe, the English satirist who savaged the apartheid regime in South Africa and went on to spray hilarious vitriol on British society, along with whatever else caught his sardonic eye.

Sharpe has died in Spain, aged 85. The village where I live in the one-time outpost of empire that is New Zealand is having a book fair this weekend, and while I was helping to sort through the piles, I came across two of his novels, Riotous Assembly and Blott on the Landscape. I'll be sure to pick them up if I can.

RIP Tom Sharpe

Hello readers – it is fine but a bit windy on an autumn day in New Zealand, where I live. Wherever you are, I hope your weather is at least as fine.

My part of the universe is otherwise mostly OK too. Just now I am thinking and researching a new novel, while I try to persuade the part of the universe that is not my part to buy my latest one. And all the other ones. And even the ones people think I wrote but didn’t.

The new one has the working title of Lapchicken Rules, and the aim is to write something funny for a change. If I have a contemporary model in this, it would be Tom Sharpe. His best books are funny while retaining a serious – and even savage – purpose: witness The Throwback and The Great Pursuit.

Writing humour is not easy, especially at length. Some of my posts in this blog are meant to raise a smile at least but sixty thousand words or more of guffaws are a different matter altogether. And I do not mean just to be funny.

Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 masterpiece film, Dr Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, is a good example. This film starred Peter Sellers in three roles, including Dr Strangelove, an ex-Nazi physicist in a wheelchair who kept having to drag his arm down from a Hitler salute, the president of the United States, looking suspiciously like Adlai Stevenson, and an English flight lieutenant who almost but not quite saves the world.

It would be nice to digress here, so I will. Adlai Stevenson was one of many American politicians with an odd first name. You would think a weird name would tend to disqualify but it seems to have acted as a magnet for the bearer to wish to be President of the Yew-nited States! I mean, Adlai! Harry Truman you think was normal but his middle name was an initial – S. Lyndon Johnson may have put a stop to this agreeable tradition until Barack Obama, as all the Presidents in between have had normal names, if sometimes a bit boring and candidates with odd ones have gone south. I mean, would you want a President named Mitt? This is a baseball glove! Or Hubert? He lost to a Richard, who really was a dick. This election year has a Donald, a Marco, a Rafael (“Ted” Cruz), and a Bernard, but nothing like Dwight or Adlai or Ulysses, or Millard. Millard Fillmore! Wow! Adlai’s grandfather was actually Vice-President (1893-1897) so it wasn’t a handicap back then but it was in 1952 and 1956 against a Dwight. Dwight isn’t that great either so he called himself “Ike” to compensate for his surname being so long and German – Eisenhower. There is a musician whose surname was Dwight but he changed it to John. His first name was Reginald and he wasn’t too keen on that either and struck out wildly for a catchy “Elton”. Elton’s new middle name is Hercules. You probably already knew this. He doesn’t want to be President – or if he does, is disqualified by being British. Is he resentful? Write him and ask.

I am back! If you are still here hope you enjoyed that side trip. Dr Strangelove was rightly termed a comedy of terrors rather than errors as Shakespeare had it. This was a film about the end of the cold war via meltdown, through a nutty American Air Force general who kept muttering about “precious bodily fluids” and sent his nuclear squadrons off to flatten the Commos. One does. End of film and story, and us!

Kubrick’s film is often very funny. It is full of gags – one liners it would be wrong to put here for those who have not seen the film.

My idea is to write something funny like that, only different – of course. But just as brill.

Shakespeare as always is a kind of exemplar. The bard’s comedies are not necessarily all funny, and typically they have an underlying life-threatening premise. There are heaps of laughs but the characters may need death defying courage before they discover bliss and (usually) true love. As You Like It is how we like it! The more serious dramas, and tragedies, can also have humorous interludes that give point to the terrible events that surround them. There are, for example, quite a number of gags in Hamlet.

The storyline of the new one is not yet complete, and the research is ongoing and will be right through the final passages. But so far, it’s fun! Writing is not always fun, and the writing part quite frequently is as terrifying as it is satisfying – even simultaneously!

You could say that’s part of the point for a writer. My best prose – according to me of course – has given me goosebumps as I’ve written it, and repeated re-readings have still held that delicious frisson, if at a reduced rate. Sometimes this blog does that too and when a reader writes that s/he has laughed out loud at something, my anaemic chest swells with pride. “Not enough plumage, bird-brain” is my self-criticism, but I do it anyway.

So the adventure continues. There is a lot between here and there – characters ah “fleshed out”, storyline ditto, which includes place, time, duration of time, and lots more. . .but the idea is there and the premise. And I’m beetling on.

Thanks for reading.