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1.0 out of 5 stars
Below par slapstick. Pointless., Jun 10 2002
I hadn't read a Tom Sharpe book in maybe ten years, but what I remember were absurd but still gruesomely funny, bawdy adventures in the world of slapstick (the episode in The Throwback with the prophylactic, the oven cleaner and the cheese grater remains one of the funniest things I've ever read). Well, I stumbled upon Vintage Stuff in an charity shop the other day and thought I'd give it a go for old times' sake. I wish I hadn't bothered. Tom Sharpe's literary star has waned of late (having reached its zenith in the early Eighties), and reading this book it isn't hard to see why. The thing about slapstick - and Sharpe should know this, as he's a (past) master at it - is to exaggerate and caricature; extrapolate and inflate, but never so as to totally break the bounds of credibility. There need to be scenes and situations which any of us might find ourselves in, and only the unusual confluence of all of them at once suggests this could never really happen in real life. In Vintage Stuff, this simply isn't the case. Even the premise is ridiculous, and the decisions, behaviour and reactions of all the characters are plainly silly, without ever hinting at being funny. Sharpe's writing style, usually so light, is leaden; the dialogue isn't credible and the denouement is both unpleasant and anticlimactic. You may spy also a rather spiteful, laboured, resentment of the public school system. This has all the hallmarks of an empty barrel being scraped. Avoid.
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