Humour is very difficult to get right, and it is almost impossible to define what makes something “funny”, particularly in books. Some writers seem to achieve an effortless humour, almost as though it would be impossible for them to be serious. Jerome K Jerome and George and Weedon Grossmith from an earlier age, or Tom Sharpe, and Tom Wolfe from more recent times, all seem to achieve this effortless humour, largely based on the ridiculousness of their characters and the inventive situations they place them in.
In Rancid Pansies, James Hamilton-Paterson gives another outing to his character Gerald Samper who has already appeared in Cooking with Fernet Branca, and Amazing Disgrace and I have to say, the concept is now wearing a bit thin. As I flick through the book now, I think I can see why. The book consists of pages and pages of blocks of text, describing the inner thoughts of Samper, with surprisingly little dialogue. The pages look dense and hard work, as in fact they are. While it was amusing to get inside the head of Samper for the first book and maybe the second, most readers will now feel that they know quite enough about him and his supercilious outlook on life and perhaps don’t really need a further instalment of his self-regarding eccentricity. I think by the end of this book I had actually come to form an intense dislike for Gerald Samper and was glad to reach the last page.
The events that are described are not all that funny. For example, Samper has an interest in making “weird food” – beetle vol au vents and such like, and one of the set-pieces is where an attempt to make an hors d’oevure from field mice results in the dinner guests vomiting simultaneously. Another set-piece is the premiere performance of Samper’s new opera when during the third act, a local eccentric wanders onto the stage in a penguin suit and molests the leading lady.
These events are incidental to the main story which is about Samper’s Tuscan house collapsing down a hill after which rumours circulate that the occupants made a miraculous escape due to divine intervention from Princess Diana (the title of the book Rancid Pansies is in fact an anagram of Princess Diana). Samper sees an opportunity to make money from the ensuing Diana cult and before long a shrine to Diana has been built on the site of the land-slide. Again, not really that funny, particularly when most of the humour is supposed to be found in Samper’s observations of these events rather than the events themselves.
Another problem with the book is that it is actually a sequel to the others, and Hamilton-Paterson seems obliged to recap on the previous two books whenever any reference is made to events or people the reader may have encountered before. This is tedious, particularly when throughout the book we get little synopses of the previous stories. I think it would have been better if the book had been allowed to stand on its own rather than incorporating these numerous flash-backs.
Hamilton Paterson seems to be conscious that his readers may be spending a little too much time inside Gerald Samper’s head and so to provide a more impartial view of events, he keeps including lengthy emails sent from one of Samper’s friends to a colleague describing Samper’s behaviour. As the sender of the emails does not feature much in the book other than as the writer of emails, I am not sure that this device works all that well. It feels like we readers have to have this independent commentary throughout the book in order to explain to us what is really going on. Its all a bit convoluted I’m afraid.
Some years ago, John Lanchester created a very similar character to Gerald Samper in his book The Debt To Pleasure. Whereas Lanchester created a sparkling novel and left it at that, I think James Hamilton Paterson has now worn out these characters and needs to put them to bed. Its a shame really because he is of course a highly regarded writer in other fields.
