Blott on the Landscape

by Tom Sharpe

Book Overview

In Blott on the Landscape, the landscape is flawless and the trees majestic until Sir Giles, a man of few principles and curious tastes, plots to destroy all this by building a highway smack through it, to line his own pocket and at the same time to dispose of his wife, the capacious Lady Maude. Sir Giles recruits to his side Hoskins, a corrupt local official, Lord Leakham, the environmental equivalent of a hanging judge, and Dundridge, a troublesome...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394724194
• ISBN13: 9780394724195
• Release Date: October 1984
• Publisher: Vintage Books USA
• Length: 237 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.

Customer Reviews

One of the few authors that REALLY make me laugh

Tom Sharpe, Christopher Brookmyre, P.J. O'Rourke, Stephen Fry, P.G.Wodehouse - they all fall into the category of authors who REALLY make me laugh. If you mix up Billy Connelly and John Cleese, you'll get the idea. In Blott on the Landscape (which was turned into a BBC television series), Sharpe's humour is as sharp as ever (pun intended) and his characterizations are an absolute scream. Of course, it helps if you appreciate British humour which, at times, can be quite black. (A woman getting a lion to eat her own husband?)Tom Sharpe's 'Wilt' books were comical enough but, in Blott on the Landscape and Porterhouse Blue, he excels even his own high standards of comic writing.

Great title, great book

This is the first Tom Sharpe I read, and it just seems so much better that the others...I first saw the t.v. series, and was even more impressed by the book. I loved eveything about it, the plot, the exagerrated characters, the way everything fits together at the end. I was a bit disturbed that I could laugh so much about a woman deliberately letting a lion eat her (thoroughly horrible and worthless) husband, but this is the mad world that Tom Sharpe takes you to. Ther way the betrayed wife should become best friend and ally with her husbands mistress is just hysterical! My other favourite character was the poor,bureacratically challenged head of the motorway planning authourity who had none! A great book to escape into.

Hilarious!

This one is not as great as Wilt, but still awesome. If you want to forget about everything and laugh a lot - read Tom Sharpe.

If you like to laugh...

Why aren't there more books like this? Is it that humor is a sentiment lacking in most writers today? Sharpe has taken two classic plot devices: political intrigue and marriage's romantic ebb, and raised them to a Fawlty Towers-esque level of perpetual humor. The comedy doesn't detract from the intellectual farce of local British bureaucracy, and there are enough twists and turns to keep any reader interested. There should be sequels to this novel (instead of his despicable Wilt, which you should avoid). If anyone finds a writer comparable to Mr. Sharpe, please let me know. And I don't like to compare him with Wodehouse, as the critics do, for Mr. Sharpe's humor is much more accessible and less slapstick.

An extremely funny,laugh out loud and roll on the floor,book

This book is one of the funniest books I have ever read. It introduces a series of characters, from self-serving politicians to their innocent victims (his wife, in one case) and people who work for them, especially Blott. An MP who married money and land wants an excuse to sell it for redevelopment. His constituents do not want it redeveloped, and neither does his wife, so he must appear to be against development while conniving to ensure that the government will proceed. His wife, and a longtime servant (who went there as a World War 2 POW) contrive ever more outrageous defences, ending in a military assault with heavy weapons. I have never found an American author as funny as this, and hope someone will recommend one to me.