Vintage Stuff by Tom Sharpe

 


One of the most outrageously hilarious tales ever written. I say this as a seasoned Tom Sharpe fan.

The British author's satiric needle sticks deep when, beginning on the very first page, he describes one of his main characters, a teenage lad who has been driving everyone crazy. Peregrine Roderick Clyde-Brown's beauty “was the sort usually seen after a particularly nasty car accident.” Peregrine takes absolutely everything literally. If someone told Peregrine to go jump in a lake, he'd walk to the nearest lake - even if he had to hike three hours - and promptly jump in. Peregrine's father, a lawyer, rightly sees Peregrine as a gullible blockhead, but his mum thinks he's just a late bloomer. No reputable English public boarding school (equivalent to a private school in the US) would accept such a dunce. However, his mother refuses to send Peregrine to a day school (public school in the US) where he would be influenced by all those crass lower-class boys and girls.

After much searching, his father finds a high school that will actually admit Peregrine, a school by the name of Groxbourne. Groxbourne is virtually unknown in academic circles with its reputation limited to a few agricultural training colleges.

It is here Tom Sharpe's savagely satirical black comedy takes aim. As it transpires, the Headmaster of Groxbourne (a parody of the author's own Bloxham School) attributes the long list of graduates who fought and died in the two World Wars to its excellent sports facilities. And the more we learn, the clearer it becomes that Groxbourne shares many similarities with a military boot camp, even boasting “a special course for the Overactive Underachiever” run by Major Fetherington.

Indeed, anyone with a shred of sense will recognize that Groxborne is a brutal place, characterized by appalling instruction and frequent beatings. One of the schoolmasters openly professes that a beaten boy becomes a better boy. For dad, Groxbourne is perfect since he sees the Army as his son's future and he judges a few good beatings will be just the thing needed to knock some sense into Peregrine's thick skull. Dad hands the Headmaster a check for three full academic years plus an amount for the school restoration fund. Peregrine is sent off to Groxbourne.

And the schoolmaster who advocated repeated beatings to improve a boy's character? His name is Mr. Rodney Glodstone, and Peregrine will be placed in Mr. Glodstone's house. Again, Tom Sharpe's stinging satire is on full display. Although Glodstone speaks with an upper-class British accent, plays cricket, and can teach fencing, when it came to literature (and many other things), he remained a fourteen-year-old boy, admiring such characters as Richard Hannay, The Scarlet Pimpernel, and Bulldog Drummond. Glodstone even had made a pilgrimage every summer to the setting of one of his adventure stories in his 1927 Bentley, thinking that one day he'll be summoned by fate to take on the role of hero in his very own romantic adventure.

That blessed day comes. Mr. Slymme, the school's liberal-minded geography teacher who loathes Glodstone, concocts an elaborate plan whereby our Bulldog Drummond wannabe will set off, fully armed, to France in his Bentley to rescue La Comtesse de Monton, mother of one of the boys in his charge, who is currently being held prisoner - or so Glodstone is led to believe - in her castle. Now, every hero needs a loyal sidekick, every Batman his Robin, and for Glodstone, that means none other than Peregrine Clyde-Brown, “a boy endowed with the physique, courage, and mental attributes of a genuine hero.”

Oh, yes, the big and strong Peregrine was made for Groxbourne. "Unlike more sensitive boys, who found the school an initiation of hell, he was in his element.” The rugged teenager genuinely enjoyed enduring repeated caning, relished all the grueling military exercises, took pleasure in pummeling his opponents senseless in boxing matches — and, most of all, cherished the school's shooting range, where he could pretend he was vanquishing the enemy.

Peregrine also enjoyed all the adventure novels he was invited to read by Glodstone. However, there's a difference. “Unlike Glodstone, whose heroes were romantic and born of nostalgia, Peregrine was more modern. Seated on the running-board of the Bentley, he was not Bulldog Drummond and Richard Hanny, he was Bond and The Jackal: a man licensed to kill.” A man licensed to kill - foreshadowing with a vengeance. Not surprisingly in a Tom Sharpe novel, as Glodstone and Peregrine journey forth, much Monty Pythonesque pandemonium will surely follow.

I could not locate one comprehensive review of Vintage Stuff. This is surprising when we consider Tom Sharpe makes his most caustic commentary on a society valuing unflinching obedience, physical toughness, and cunning over developing critical thinking skills within the context of a liberal arts education.

I've read and reviewed a good number of Tom Sharpe novels, but it is Vintage Stuff I'd recommend above all his others.


British author Tom Sharpe, 1928-2013