Porterhouse Blue is a tale of an ossified world struggling to avoid modernity. When a former politician is parachuted into the role of Master of Porterhouse College, Cambridge, his desire to create change is met with horror and resistance by the staff, not least the venerable Skullion, night-porter of the college. Unbeknowst to all, however, the life of the troubled student Zipser is about to wreak much more explosive changes on the institution.Porterhouse was something of a breakthrough for Tom Sharpe. The novel picked up a sense of the conflict of 1970s Britain and encapsulated it in a world at which it was easy for people to laugh with detachment. Reading it forty years later, however, the satire is less resonant and we are left with what is actually one of Sharpe's less well-constructed books. The key protagonists are not, like Henry and Eva Wilt, complex and rounded characters with detailed inner lives, but thin types designed merely to serve the plot and it's easy to forget that much of the televisual portrayal of Skullion was David Jason's performance rather than Sharpe's writing. The other university staff are like a prototype for Terry Pratchett's bumbling wizards, only with less charm.The book is also tonally lopsided. Sharpe's sexual frankness is a key part of his popularity and at his best his books revel in raunch - much of Wilt never made the screen for precisely that reason. In Porterhouse this element of Sharpe's writing is confined to the subplot with Zipser: it's an admittedly very clever invention, but one which goes off like a nervous virgin far too early in the proceedings, leaving little more than awkward fumbling to follow. And you feel that Sharpe was aware of this problem, as the book becomes increasingly rushed in its later chapters - Skullion's arc closing particularly sharply in the wake of his confronation with Godber.All this is not to say the book is irredeemable. The slender volume reads relatively quickly and will raise a few laughs along the way, but anyone expecting a classic of modern comic literature may well be disappointed.
Long before I'd ever set foot in Cambridge I worked in London and always read paperbacks commuting on the Underground. London Transport is a place where you want escapism, I read a lot of science fiction and also comedy, so a parody of the Ivory Towers of Academe looked like it might distract me from the rush-hour Tube. Well almost all the books I read then I've forgotten, but Porterhouse Blue sticks in the memory because of the acute embarrassment it caused me. You try not to make an exhibition and a fool of yourself in public don't you, you try not to choke and turn red in the face, accidentally guffaw spit on the person opposite, fall off your seat, poke your neighbor in the ribs, suffice it to say I did not keep my cool, this book is uncontrollably laugh-out-loud FUNNY. Read it, read it, read it, but for God's sake read it locked in a room on your own.(Like a lot of humourists Sharpe is not kind to his subject, so I was pleased when I later did get to know Cambridge that's it's really nothing like the dystopian farce depicted here. It's actually much more like Terry Pratchett's Unseen University.)
What do You think about Porterhouse Blue (1999)?
Have just acquired this book & re-read the text for the first time in many years. It's every bit as funny as I remember. Reading Zipser's adventures left me laughing out loud. Tom Sharpe's characters are drawn with a truly wicked wit. His characters. though exaggerated from real life, are utterly and delightfully recognisable to anyone who has any experience or knowledge of Oxbridge life.I'm surprised that Tom Sharpe never (as far as I'm aware) re-wrote this book as a play for the stage. It would be ideal for Chichester, or would have been (before the IRA bomb) for Manchester's Old Royal Exchange theatre.
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I found this book at a yard sale or used book store years ago, had never even heard of the author. If you're and Oxford Grad, an Englishman or Anglophile (Gabe, I'm looking at you...), then you'll probably enjoy this book. I am none of these, but I found this hilarious. It basically chronicles the pettiness, in-fighting, and less then stellar academic standards of one of the lesser universities in Cambridge. Very British, and perhaps a bit dated (i think it was published in the early '70's), but I was laughing out loud the whole time. Any books that manages to use a case of frozen prophylactics as a major plot point can't be all bad!
—Justin
This is the FIRST Tom Sharpe book I've ever read.A good friend told me about it while driving me to the airport last Sunday and we were both killing ourselves laughing.So while in Brisbane I found the ONLY Tom Sharpe book in a well-known secondhand bookshop and it was the exact book we were talking about.Up to page 54 and so far so good.But feel I might have enjoyed it more years ago.We'll see, as the Zen Master said!!!An enjoyable read.Institutional corruption. Resistance to change when the new boss arrives on the scene. Usually that is just change for change's sake. Here it is vital as Porterhouse College is rotten to the core.But no one in this book is likeable nor do you need to 'identify ' with any character. It's black and nobody is spared. All the usuals are trotted out ...sex, death, corruption...but all with rollicking good humour. And that which few British books are free of - their class/caste system.So...VERY British. VERY familiar.But Tom Sharpe is an original, so you will be well taken care of.An excellent writer - intelligent, witty, experienced.
—Wayne
