The Gropes is a terrifically funny Tom Sharpe novel.
Yes, yes, I can see my positive assessment runs counter to nearly all other reviews posted.
Many reviewers judge The Gropes
a disappointment, a story where author Tom Sharpe appears to have been
simply following his long established comic formula to win some laughs -
after all, the British author wrote The Gropes at age 80 with over a dozen sidesplitting novels already to his credit.
We
can understand such harsh judgement here since a reviewer usually
relies on comparison as part of their stockpile of analytic tools in
assessing a work, frequently contrasting the book with the author's
overall output. And Tom Sharpe's oeuvre rates phenomenal, novels like Riotous Assembly (send up of the South African police force), Porterhouse Blue (send up of academia), The Wilt Alternative (send up of, well, all strata of British society). I wonder what reviewers would say if Sharpe published The Gropes as his one and only novel. Oh, well, that's the breaks, Tom. You've been hoisted on the petard of your own past success.
Anyway, with The Gropes
we have the author's vintage broad, over-the-top, Monty Python style
absurdity and slapstick, literary fiction with enough helpings of the
politically incorrect to offend readers inclined to be offended. But for
those courageous booklovers up for something completely different (a la
John Cleese's Python intro), this, the author's shortest novel, will be
a delight. As for myself, reading proved so much fun I could hardly put
the book down.
The tale opens thusly: Grope Hall in the
hinterlands of northeast England, specifically in the County of
Northumberland, possess a history lapsing into legend, a legacy of
dominant women, fierce of temperament, hideous of looks and unsurpassed
of strength, women who must resort to kidnapping men to father their
daughters (baby boys are either strangled or kept on as slave labor), a
proud tradition extending to the years prior to the Norman Conquest when
Ursula Grope took a sick Viking by the name of Awgard back to her sod
hut and forced the huge, muscular warrior afflicted by illness to marry
and take on the name of Grope.
By the turn of the twentieth
century, Grope Hall is headed by a brood of huge, musclebound, extremely
ugly women and fortified by stone walls and barbed wire. Just to make
sure outsiders are kept out, a pack of snarling bloodhounds and two
angry Spanish bulls grace the grassland of the estate. But modernization
finally catches up the Grope women and by the closing years of the
century nearly all flee the deadly isolation of Grope Hall. And then we
read: "It was to this isolated estate and ancient farmhouse that, as the
new millennium dawned, Belinda Grope, niece of the now aged Myrtle,
brought a young and largely callow youth named Esmond Wiley."
Tom
Sharpe makes a quick shift to Esmond Wiley's boyhood and the backstory
of his parents, Mr. Horace Wiley and Mrs. Vera Wiley. So as not to
reveal too many surprises as the story bounces along, I'll simply
highlight a quartet of my favorite bits:
Pounding Heart – Ever
since she was a teenager, Vera immersed herself in Barbara Cartland-type
romance novels, “she lived in a world in which men, gentlemen of
course, proposed marriage passionately on clifftops under a full moon
with the waves crashing on the rocks below.” We watch as Vera presses
milquetoast bank manager Horace Wiley into the role of passionate
romantic (and to think, the reserved, mild-mannered sop only wished to
have the comforts and stability of married life). Poor deluded man, if
you only knew.
Victim
of Passion – Vera named her son Esmond after a character in one of the
romantic novels she happened to be reading shortly before his birth.
Vera attempted to mold Esmond into the ideal romantic gentleman. “It was
bad enough to be called Esmond but to see also the image of Vera’s
romantic hero littering the house and on sale in every bookshop and
newsagent he went into was enough to make even an insensitive boy aware
that he could never live up to his mother’s hopes and expectations.” On
top of this, every single time Esmond accompanied his mother in public,
she would announce in a loud voice that Esmond was her love child, a
true love child (without the faintest idea that people understood her to
mean her son was a little bastard, born out of wedlock). Meanwhile,
Esmond couldn’t begin to comprehend the dynamics of the situation since
“he was too busy enduring the jeers, catcalls and whistles of any and
everyone who happened to be in the vicinity at the time.”
Doppelgänger
– Poor, poor Horace Wiley – the guy simply can’t win. “Esmond Wiley
made a mockery of his father’s hopes. He resembled Mr. Wiley so
precisely that there were moments in front of the shaving mirror when
Horace had the terrifying illusion that his son was staring back at him.
The same large ears, the same small eyes and thin lips, even the same
nose, confronted him.” And then on his fourteenth birthday, when
Edmond’s Uncle Albert gives him a drum set for a present, Horace’s only
escape from the racket is to leave early for work and return late at
night after stopping at the local pub to fortify himself with the hard
stuff.
Bumblers – Events move apace until a grand explosion at
the home of Uncle Albert prompts the local newspaper to write: “POLICE
TERRORISTS BLOW HOUSE UP – WHO NEEDS TERRORISTS WHEN WE’VE GOT THE
SECURITY POLICE.” As with his skewering the South African police in Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure, Tom Sharpe can’t help himself when the local men in blue arrive on the scene.
Again, The Gropes
is the author’s shortest novel (the publisher stretches the book to 247
pages by large font and multiple black spaces). If you’re up for
several hours of satire and extreme slapstick, a novel well worth your
time.
British author Tom Sharpe, 1928-2013
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