Porterhouse Blue

Memory plays tricks. I remember this Tom Sharpe novel as being full of belly laughs, but a second reading 20 years later reveals it to be more wit than pratfall. It is no less satisfying for that. The character of Skullion, head porter at Cambridge's fictional Porterhouse College, deserves to go down as a mythic figure in literature as defender of tradition against a new master. His name itself — evoking skull, skullery, hellion, even scorpion — is cause for a smile whenever he appears. No one is protected from Sharpe's poisonous pen, and the Buster Keaton-like calamity, when it comes, provides the laughs of memory.