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.
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
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.
Derelict Space Sheep is pleased to announce the forthcoming release of Sirens, an original novel by Simon Messingham.
cover art by Emily Coelli
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.
Alien invasion? Divine intervention? Evolution? Before anyone could work it out, it was too late.
Anthony Graves didn’t want to be a Siren. He just wanted to be liked. Once a shy, suburban London office worker, five years on he is ruler of Europe and responsible for the deaths of millions.
To fight loneliness, Anthony writes his life story. The result is Sirens; a black comedy of how a Nobody unwittingly became an all-powerful tyrant.
Sirens is satire on a global scale; a cautionary tale of absolute power and its inevitable consequences.
You’re going to love Anthony. You’d better.
Simon Messingham is the author of eight novels for the BBC’s Doctor Who range. Sirens is due for release on 18 April 2017.
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
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: 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 written more novels.
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 to prose).