The Wilt Inheritance by Tom Sharpe (Random House, 2010); audiobook read by Michael Tudor Barnes (Isis, 2011) Erstwhile satirist Sharpe seems here merely to have given up on the world. ‘Wilt’ is notionally a comedy of (ill)manners, but the line-by-line laughs are lacking and the plot, for all its spiteful bluster, visits no comeuppance upon its singularly dislikeable cast. …
Tag Archive for satire
Lost for Words
Lost for Words by Edward St Aubyn (Picador, 2014) Albeit a clever excoriation, Lost for Words is consumed from within by satire and stands not just against but also thus as absurdist champion of pretentiousness. St Aubyn, in lampooning lit. culture and awards, does rather seem like he’s angling for one.
Blott on the Landscape
Blott on the Landscape by Tom Sharpe (Secker & Warburg, 1975); audiobook read by David Suchet (AudioGO, 2011) Sharpe weaves plot strands like Wodehouse and is similarly dexterous in his use of prose. He is coarse, though, and often vulgar, his characters toilet plungered en masse from the unseemly depths of human nature. Nonetheless, ‘Blott’ executes a dizzying comedic spiral.…
Sirens Publication Date Set
Derelict Space Sheep is pleased to announce the forthcoming release of Sirens, an original novel by Simon Messingham. The authorities called it The Moment. Without warning, without explanation, two hundred human beings on Earth simultaneously gained a new mental ability that would alter the planet forever. They called the power The Glamour and its recipients Sirens. …
A Pelican at Blandings
A Pelican at Blandings by P. G. Wodehouse (Barrie & Jenkins, 1969) Though less satirically relevant nowadays, Wodehouse’s novels of the (farcically characterised) idle rich retain their charm, not least of all by way of a prose style that in tone both adopts and parodies the lifestyle, romping with indifference, self-indulgence and Machiavellian remove.
The Robot Who Looked Like Me
The Robot Who Looked Like Me by Robert Sheckley (Sphere, 1978) A short fiction collection in which the reader is promised (and given) satire, inventiveness and humour, but also off-the-cuff storytelling, an intrusive sexual focus, a name writer’s complacency and maddening, devil-may-care flights of fancy that lead nowhere under the guise of surrealism.
The Seventh Man
The Seventh Man: My Part in the Defection Scandal by Geoffrey T. Alsop, as told to Graeme Garden (Eyre Methuen, 1981) Judging from this clever satire on official deniability, in which a senior MI6 operative misinterprets and overlooks at every hapless turn (and even unwittingly participates in) the now-infamous defection of British diplomats Burgess and Maclean, Graeme Garden should have…
42 Word Review: Life, the Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams
Life, the Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams (MacMillan Audio, 2006) [First published by Pan, 1982] read by Martin Freeman Reprising the vast zaniness and existential satire of the original Hitchhiker’s duology, Adams ups his trademark discursiveness, redoubles his protagonists’ fecklessness and yet achieves an oddly cohesive transcendence (while Martin Freeman’s delivery makes a virtue of Adams’ sometimes facetious approach…