Customer Reviews

Wilt on High

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

'Wilt on High' is another installment of our hapless suburban lecturer Henry Wilt who somehow gets into a total mess with his befuddled wife, demonic quadruplet daughters, the neighbours, the police, and the militia. The story is typical Sharpe craziness; it really isn't worth trying to explain it all. However 'Wilt on High' strikes me as one of Sharpe's weaker efforts, which is especially disappointing since the book starts off rather nicely.

It is advisable to read 'Wilt' before 'Wilt on High' since it is more or less a sequel. Besides 'Wilt' is a much better read - a classic.

Alas, too few of Sharpe's novels are available in an audio version. This one is, in full-length, and is capable of sending you off the road many times, if listening, as I did, on a long car trip. I have all of Sharpe's novels, and have concluded that he is an acquired taste. Too bad the BBC TV hasn't seen fit to do more of them.

It might be (and has been) said, with some justice, that this novel is one of Sharpe's crueler and more mean-spirited efforts. Well, at least Wilt is not plotting to murder his wife in this one! I'll grant that there's a hard, bitter edge to the book (especially in the treatment of the Satanic quadruplets), but nevertheless I thought it was very funny, and Sharpe's sense for the absurd is on target as usual. I burst out laughing at least half a dozen times while reading it. It's a rare book that can get any outburst from me other than, "What a pile of *!%@", so clearly I enjoyed it. I haven't read any of the other Wilt novels, and now I plan to get them all.

I've read "Porterhouse Blue", "Riotous Assembly", and "Blott on the Landscape" by Sharpe, and I give them all the thumbs up.

If you like wickedly black satire that isn't afraid to plunge into the gutter in its efforts to mock our gutter society, then you'll like this book.

Tom Sharpe is one of the very few writers who can write and have something to say - apart from desperate attempts to entertain bored readers. This is an acerbic, vitriolic and cynical portrait of our rotten world written without any limits, restrictions etc. The best satire I've ever read in my life, and a universal one - it applies to any society or any country. As scary as Orwell. But hilarious. A true writer of rare and great talent.

Didn't you hear me the first time?

This is the funniest book that's ever been written in the English language.

It helps to know that the "Quads" are the perpetrator's quadruplets, but other than that single pause, I laughed my head off. I read the thing on a flight from London the New York, and twice the flight attendant thought I was having an epileptic fit. I could not speak the second time, and I just held up the book, and she seemed to immediately understand.

This is the book they killed the Germans with in Month Python.

You've been warned.

This book suprised me because I did not find it at all funny and this is a first for this author. The usual dark humor and madness was mostly of a cruel bland content. The quadruplet daughters lacked depth of character to be believed in their antics. The humour is just not up to the previous standard which make me wounder who is acutally writing this book. The first book 'Wilt' was really 'Funny' but sadly this sequel falls a long way short.

Somebody said the humor is the most subversive of the arts. While I do not think that this book have embodied any kind of social message, it satirizes everything from family, the army, politicians, education, wealth, prestige etc.(Actually religion is left alone). Wilt is a professor at a polytechnic who like to think of himself as a humanist, and a no nonsense guy. Nevertheless, when female student dies of an overdose of heroin he becomes the main suspect of the police as being a provider of the substance.

While Wilt is oblivious to the fact that he is a suspect, the police department assigns an overachiever inspector to solve the case, who in its eagerness to catch who he believes is the biggest drug pusher in the county. Logically, Wilt will continue with is everyday life, that for some unknown reason refuses to be calm and quiet as he would like, forcing him to act in an awkward manner. The police inspector puzzled by his behavior ends up breaching every possible law of privacy with the most hilarious results a reader can expect.