Mixed Pickles - the Book log 2012

Okey-dokey, let's start with the publishing economics of this book. 246 pages, 43 chapters. Each chapter starts halfway down a page so thats (hmmm) 21.5 blank pages.
On average, each chapter ends halfway down a page, so thats another 21.5 pages. And every chapter starts on a right-hand page, meaning that if the previous chapter finished on a right hand page, the new chapter is faced by a completely blank page. This happens, on average, every other chapter. That's another 21 pages. That's 63 (sixty-three, and you know they are big numbers when the teletype prints them out in words on the football scores) pages containing nothing. That's a quarter of the book.

And the typeface is big. Very big. Probably almost big enough to have the words "You won't need your magnifying-book-page-reader for this one" on the cover and to go on the shelves in the library marked "Large Print". So what does this all mean? Well, it means that you don't get much book for your money in terms of number of words. And, sadly, you don't get much book for your money in terms of writing.


Now, I remember when Tom Sharpe was a master farceur. His characters whirled in a typhoon of misunderstanding and misapprehensions. Language tied itself in knots as meanings doubled back on themselves and bit their speakers well-and-truly in the backside. Onjects animate and inanimate conspired to trap Sharpe's victims in the unlikeliest, and yet, oddly enough, the most plausible manner.

I remember having to thrust an open paperback (one of the two South African novels) into the hands of the person sitting next to me on the Tube one day, just so they could see the cause of the tears that were pouring down my face, and then having to wrestle the damn thing back from them when they were reduced to the same state. But I was younger then. And so was Tom Sharpe.

And there, for me, lies the major problem with this book. It is old. It is tired. It is perfunctory. All marriage is loveless. Sex is procreation, not recreation. The police are stupid. Women are selfish dominators. Men are spineless. Sharpe has written all this before, but always given us, at the heart of the novel, a character we can care for. Not this time.

The cast comprises (a) a married couple where a spineless man is dominated by his wife, (b) a married, infertile, couple where a stereotypical Essex wide boy husband fails to satisfy his wife, so she dominates him by making him take of his shoes when he enters the room, and (c) the spineless male product of union (a).

Add some police whose presence (as is often the case) is to misinterpret an everyday phrase to draw the conclusion that something significant has taken place. The phrase in this case is "bloody thing", which our policeman, in order to actually make something happen in the plot, is forced to interpret in a Shakespearean fashion, and assume that a "bloody thing" is a thing covered in blood (this despite the fact that he, himself uses "bloody" as an oath only a page or two distant). And so weak is this misinterpretation that Sharpe even has to underline it, to virtually draw the reader aside and say "Did you see what he did there? He completely misunderstood!". When an author has to nudge you in the ribs like a drunk in a saloon bar, you know you are in trouble.

The book ends suddenly. So suddenly that I thought some pages must have fallen out in the binding process, but no - it just stops. The grand denouement doesn't occur. All the (surviving) characters do a 180 degree turn; not even a graceful U-turn, just a handbrake turn which fails to raise any dust, or convince the reader.

There is one vintage Sharpe comic image. One. Just one. I won't tell you what it is, or where it is, but when something about transvesticism raises a smile to your lips, you know that the book has just peaked, and you can put it down content in the knowledge that you won't miss anything by continuing no further.