Tom Sharpe's fertility of invention, comic brio, and savage satire have made him a popular writer whose books sell in large numbers in Great Britain and, since the middle 1980s, in the United States. After ten years working as a teacher and a photographer in South Africa (which gave him the material for his first two novels) and nearly another decade teaching in England, he began writing fiction at the age of forty-one. His outrageously farcical novels share cultural and intellectual concerns with those of earlier comic novelists such as Thomas Love Peacock and Aldous Huxley, and at his best Sharpe may be compared with the great Augustan satirists, such as Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope; yet, his fiction can also decline into the repetitively mechanical. While reviewers generally praised his early novels, many later criticized his lack of sympathy for his characters, his repeated use of excremental...