Reading the 20th Century discussion

Welcome to our November 2024 buddy read of....




Wilt (1976)

by

Tom Sharpe



Henry Wilt, tied to a daft job and a domineering wife, has just been passed over for promotion yet again. Ahead of him at the Polytechnic stretch years of trying to thump literature into the heads of plasterers, joiners, butchers and the like. And things are no better at home where his massive wife, Eva, is given to boundless and unpredictable fits of enthusiasm -for transcendental meditation, yoga or the trampoline. But if Wilt can do nothing about his job, he can do something about his wife, in imagination at least, and his fantasies grow daily more murderous and more concrete.

After a peculiarly nasty experience at a party thrown by particularly nasty Americans, Wilt finds himself in several embarrassing positions: Eva stalks out in stratospheric dudgeon, and Wilt, under the inspiration of gin, puts one of his more vindictive fantasies into effect. But suspicions are instantly aroused and Wilt rapidly achieves an unenviable notoriety in the role of The Man Helping Police With Their Enquiries. Or is he exactly helping? Wilt's problem -although he's on the other side of the fence -is the same as Inspector Flint's: where is Eva Wilt? But Wilt begins to flourish in the heat of the investigation, and as the police stoke the flames of circumstantial evidence, Wilt deploys all his powers to show that the Law can't tell a Missing Person from a hole in the ground.

So far it's Susan, SueLucie and me taking part


Anyone else interesting in joining us?

Not really. I read a lot of Sharpe's books back in the 70s/80s, and enjoyed them, but haven't been able to re-read them.

Perhaps I got old.

We might all come to that conclusion Rosina. It has been a long time since I picked up one of his books. This one could have dated horribly. I hope not because I have fond memories of laughing my head off first time round.

I used to laugh at Benny Hill ...

I never laughed at Benny Hill. I haven't read Tom Sharpe since I was a student, so I will hope he is still amusing, but it will still be interesting to revisit him.

I've started it. It didn't really grab me, but given that reading it together will make it more fun I'm sure I'll join in.

Benny Hill never worked for me


In fact I always was baffled by what anyone saw in it beyond a bit of slapsticky obviousness

To say his humour hasn’t aged well would be up there with the all time understatements

Ben wrote: "I've started it. It didn't really grab me, but given that reading it together will make it more fun I'm sure I'll join in."

Hurrah 🙌🏻

Bizarrely, Beatles expert, Mark Lewisohn wrote a book about Benny Hill. Funny, Peculiar: The True Story of Benny Hill

Benny Hill used to be on PBS' lineup - Saturday? Or was it Sunday? He was humorous. But maybe it was just his music and that little old man who was on there. I hear that music now and again on shows. And it still makes me laugh.

I think it was followed by The Two Ronnies - now, they were funny.

Have to admit that I didn't like any of that comedy. The Two Ronnies, Morcambe and Wise, all that Seventies stuff. I lived through it and I disliked all of it at the time.

A curious survival of Benny Hill in our household is the theme tune , Yakety Sax , which we automatically chorus whenever there's a bunch of footballers loosing their heads in the six yard box for more than a second or two . Of such tiny remnants are our lives bound .

The BH theme is meme-tastic

Susan wrote: "Have to admit that I didn't like any of that comedy. The Two Ronnies, Morcambe and Wise, all that Seventies stuff. I lived through it and I disliked all of it at the time."

Susan, you didn't like Morecambe and Wise?

Mind blown

Have to say The Two Ronnies were very funny too but M&W were peerless

Nope. Afraid not.

Nigeyb wrote: "Susan wrote: "Have to admit that I didn't like any of that comedy. The Two Ronnies, Morcambe and Wise, all that Seventies stuff. I lived through it and I disliked all of it at the time."

Susan, yo..."

We didn't get Morcomber and Wise here. At least not in Chicago. My introduction was on the Beatles Anthology cd.

My copy of Wilt arrived today and I couldn't resist a quick peek so started reading at random around the middle of the novel, and was quickly smiling and chuckling away. Can't wait to get stuck in. Roll on November

That’s a relief. I hope to enjoy it too in November.
Btw, still laugh at Morecambe and Wise!

Absolutely


What was extraordinary about M&W was how they united pretty much everyone. All ages. Their Xmas specials were watched by a significant proportion of the UK population

The fact that dignified celebrities would put themselves up for the M&W treatment added to their appeal so much.

I am just posting in the threat as it is coming up in November.

I'm waiting for the Internet Archive to recover from its attacks to resume this.

This conversation made me curious, so I looked the book up my library has it in Spanish translation but not in English, which I find fascinating.

Also, I am happy to find that I am not the only person who never found Benny Hill funny. I had thought it was because of differences in UK/US humor and culture. I’d also noticed that the people I knew who liked BH were mostly men who had not outgrown their high school locker room idea of humor.

If I can find a copy of Wilt, I might join in the read.

I'm trying to be disciplined and not read in advance of the month

I have started this now. I was worried about re-visiting Tom Sharpe as I loved him when I was young, but thankfully, I think I am going to love this re-read.

Glad to read that Susan

I might start this next as you’re already underway Susan and it will be more fun to read together

I hope to join you, sometime during this week.

Yesssss

I am reading slowly, don't worry. You'll all overtake me as I have a busy week, so I thought I'd better make a start.

I’m a few pages in and it’s coming back to me. I love the dysfunctional dynamic between Henry and Eva, and Eva’s boundless energy…..


By the time Eva got home her vocabulary had come to include several new words. She found Wilt in bed pretending to be asleep and woke him up and told him about Sally Pringsheim. Wilt turned over and tried to go back to sleep wishing to God she had stuck to her contrapuntal flower arrangements. Sexually open-ended freewheeling options were the last thing he wanted just now, and, coming from the wife of a biochemist who could afford to live in Rossiter Grove, didn't augur well for the future. Eva Wilt was too easily influenced by wealth, intellectual status and new acquaintances to be allowed out with a woman who believed that clitoral stimulation oralwise was a concomitant part of a fully emancipated relationship…...

50 pages in and it’s clear that much of the language and attitudes have dated quite badly. It is very evocative of the era and the world of further education colleges, and some of it still amuses me. The American couple are implausible but create a funny culture clash with Henry’s uptight Englishness

Yes, I think it is fair enough to say it not PC, so best avoided if you find such language difficult. I am reading Martin Amis at the same time and he is much worse! Goodness, Dead Babies is ten times more extreme than The Rachel Papers...

Wilt reminds me more of Bless This House or the Carry On Films. Wilt is quite prudish, no longer has romantic feelings about his wife (to put it nicely) and is generally fed up. He is the put upon man from Seventies soap operas - Sid James hiding in his shed, avoiding being asked to do things by the missus. Eva has become the cat he wants to kick to rid himself of his frustrations and she, childless and bored, struggles to fill her time and find a space for her emotions. Sally is a piece of work and a 'toy room' if you have got there yet? Good grief.

In a way, Wilt could be a colleague of anyone in the David Lodge books and it fits there much better than, say, The History Man, which had a darkness that neither Lodge or Sharpe have.

The toy room 😱 - truly awful


And yet the Pringsheims are presumably rooted in some kind of reality. Not a million miles away from the Zapps in Changing Places

Sally is a true villain


Susan wrote:

"In a way, Wilt could be a colleague of anyone in the David Lodge books and it fits there much better than, say, The History Man, which had a darkness that neither Lodge or Sharpe have"

100%

I do like the world of further education, especially during this era

I attended the London College of Printing in the early 80s and the printing apprentices doing curious modules to broaden their horizons is very familiar from those days.

Henry Wilt really does inhabit an appalling life - married to someone totally unsuitable, reliving the same day endlessly, no career progression, and teaching disinterested pupils who might assault him at any moment.

I still recall Inspector Flint from previous readings. He hasn't appeared yet but I am keenly anticipating his arrival

I'm glad you are enjoying it despite it's un-PC and anachronistic style

I also went to college in the 1980's. We had apprentices who infiltrated our A Level corridor and who we snubbed as the little snobs we were! I remember they could be quite rowdy.

We also had some very strange lecturers. One who attempted to assault me after me to come with him to his room (looking back on this, I was 17, so not very acceptable), one lecturer who brought politics into every single subject, while another blamed his wife for his career stalling as she had got pregnant and was often drunk. Fun times!

I am out all day today, so might get some reading time on the train.

Classic Eva……


‘And then there was that episode with the trampoline. She went to a Keep Fit Class at Bulham Village College and bought herself a fucking trampoline. You know she put old Mrs Portway in hospital with that contraption.’

'I knew there was some sort of accident but Eva never told me what actually happened,' said Betty.

'She wouldn't. It was a ruddy miracle we didn't get sued,' said Wilt. 'It threw Mrs Portway clean through the greenhouse roof. There was glass all over the lawn and it wasn't even as though Mrs Portway was a healthy woman at the best of times.'

'Wasn't she the woman with the rheumatoid arthritis?'

Wilt nodded dismally.

'And the duelling scars on her face,' he said. 'That was our greenhouse, that was.'

I have to admit that I did not read a word today! Tomorrow though I will be unaccompanied on my train journey so I will have definite reading time.

No worries Susan. I’m enjoying it.


This section is quite profound (or I’m just easily pleased)….


I mean if I didn't want this to happen why did I keep thinking up ways of killing her,' he thought at two o'clock. 'Sane people don't go for walks with a Labrador and devise schemes for murdering their wives when they can just as easily divorce them. There was probably some foul psychological reason for it. Wilt could think of several himself, rather too many in fact to be able to decide which was the most likely one. In any case a psychological explanation demanded a degree of self-knowledge which Wilt, who wasn't at all sure he had a self to know, felt was denied him. Ten years of Plasterers Two and Exposure to Barbarism had at least given him the insight to know that there was an answer for every question and it didn't much matter what answer you gave so long as you gave it convincingly. In the fourteenth century they would have said the devil put such thoughts into his head, now in a post-Freudian world it had to be a complex or, to be really up-to-date, a chemical imbalance. In a hundred years they would have come up with some completely different explanation. With the comforting thought that the truths of one age were the absurdities of another and that it didn't much matter what you thought so long as you did the right thing, and in his view he did, Wilt finally fell asleep.

The first scene with both Wilt and Inspector Flint is a classic

I’m racing through this. I’m now on p148 of 221 and, despite being dated, it is making me laugh regularly. Very glad we decided to give this one a go as I’m thoroughly enjoying revisiting this decades after my last read

That's good to hear. Me too! I am so pleased that I am not disappointed and still finding Tom Sharpe funny.

Very frustrated that I can't log in to Open Library and finish the book! I may have to break down and buy it!

Sorry to read that Ben - good luck


I have just finished. I really enjoyed it. Consistently amusing and very readable. And very of its time.

In a moment of wild enthusiasm and extravagance I have just bought the other four Wilt books in the series.

Music Magpie (via eBay) have a 4 for 3 offer so I got them all for £9.17. I know I definitely read The Wilt Alternative back in the day, but not sure about Wilt On High or Wilt In Nowhere, and I know I definitely never got to The Wilt Inheritance

Looking forward to reading on

Just starting this now. So pleased to read that you both enjoyed it, hope I do too.

Here’s hoping. Have you ever read any Tom Sharpe before?

I have reached Inspector Flint. Absolutely loving this so far.

Oh yes, I loved this way back when. I probably read the next ones too but only remember this one.

Splendid - on both counts