It was the Gert Loveday review of Rancid Pansies (it’s an anagram) that set me off to read James Hamilton-Paterson’s trilogy of comic novels that chronicles the outlandish misadventures of Gerald Samper.

Part Henry Wilt and part Bertie Wooster with a touch of the growing pains of Adrian Mole, Gerald Samper – of the Shropshire Sampers – is his own man. 

His stunted emotional life, self-involvement, and general peevish snobbery are to be filtered through the poignant lens of melodramatic and tragic childhood trauma. As a boy, he saw his elder brother and mother walk to the end of the Cobb in Lyme Regis (anagrams include grimly see and smile Gerry) and

“… swept off the face of the earth by a freak wave… leaving behind a vast and empty expanse of salt air that has surrounded me ever since.  It’s easy to see why it would always have been necessary to invent a God, if only to account for the sardonic humour of these playful and arbitrary acts. On with the farce. I wish… I wish I could stop drinking Fernet Branca in the middle of the day.”

Successful ghostwriter to insufferable sporting celebrities, Samper has bought a house with a view set in the Tuscan hillside. A man of taste and discernment, a lover of opera, and a radically experimental culinarian, he knows himself to be a great writer, a gifted singer, and a brilliant cook. A creative soul with a yearning to have his greatness recognized, he is in search of peace and quiet.

The only house in the immediate neighborhood belongs to Marta to whom the same weaselly real estate agent has also promised solitude. She is working on a score for a famous Italian director who may be making a porn film. Marta is a native of Voynia – of the former Soviet Union – and the daughter of a crime lord. 

Garlic and Fernet Branca Ice-Cream

Under the influence of excess Fernet Branca, Gerald accepts Marta’s invitation to dinner. It’s where he will savor various unspeakable Voynovian delicacies. The concept of food as pre-emptive weaponry comes to his mind. 

So to the mischief. What shall it be? Rossini — come to my aid! And he does, bless him. Only a few bars into “Vedi la data indicata” I remember he was himself an excellent cook who invented several original dishes (Tournedos Rossini being only one) and had a predilection for ice cream. Ice cream, eh? It being hot in Tuscany in late June, even up here in the mountains, I reason one can’t go far wrong bearing home-made ice cream to a dinner. I further reason that Marta requires something punitive to remind her not to make a habit of these neighbourly invitations. So what better than:

And so their adventures begin with a cascade of episodes of high drama and low farce through three very funny novels.

Fruit Bats of the Raj and Wartime Austerity

 In times of stress, Samper turns to food::

“It is very calming, this thinking about, inventing, preparing and eating food. Anything to do with food sets off reveries and memories and brilliant conceits while releasing floods of endorphins to take away pain. Sometimes I lie in bed and cheer myself up by gloating over the culinary challenges faced and overcome in the heroic cuisine of yesteryear. Maj.-Gen. Sir Aubrey Lutterworth’s Elements of Raj Cookery (1887) would surely be on every insomniac’s bedside table were it not so rare. He is full of cunning ways with fruit bats, python etc. and his recipes breathe a manly simplicity. “With a sharp dhauji remove the paws of a medium-sized panda. Discard the animal. Soak the paws overnight in a crock of fresh tikkhu juice. In the monsoon months it will be found expedient to mount a guard since the smell of tikkhu fermenting is irresistible to both upland tiger and bamboo wolf. . . ” Written, of course, at a time when the earth was ours and the bounty thereof. Nowadays we have pizza; and just look at the state of things.”

‘Buns Against Huns’

Another of his treasured possessions for bedside reading  is Emmeline Tyrwhitt Glamis’s Emergency Cuisine, “written in the dark days of 1942 when heavily rationed Londoners had accustomed themselves to an unusual diet, and stray cats and dogs had all but vanished from the city’s streets.”

Dame Emmeline (as she later became in recognition of her bravery while working in the resistance to Woolton Pie) believed that austerity could be taken too far. From her house in Berkeley Square a stream of recipes poured forth, the less eccentric often being espoused by the Women’s Institute and published in popular magazines. She regularly netted the gardens in the middle of the square to produce, according to season, owl tartlets, pigeon strudel, a fudge of robins, blackbird paté and, on one notable occasion, nightingale fritters. She discovered that the anti-aircraft battery gunners in Hyde Park were attracting rats with their National Loaf sandwiches and latrine pits, and it wasn’t long before she was trapping the rodents in sufficient quantities to bake the celebrated Pied Piper pies she then sold to Fortnum & Mason, donating the revenue to the Red Cross.”  

Dame Emmeline was also the first Englishwoman to prepare and use cockroach purée in any quantity, naming it “Victory Paste’. In her journal she herself described Victory Paste as having the flavour of ‘peanuts and vanilla, with a faint suggestion of sealing-wax; altogether agreeable’.

This sterling and free-thinking spinster was unafraid to try anything, having inherited the scientific curiosity of her distant relative Frank Buckland, the nineteenth-century naturalist and experimental gourmet who had sampled nearly all the British vertebrates and lepidoptera. She agreed with him that while earwigs were foully bitter and bluebottles unspeakable, woodlice were a plausible alternative to potted shrimp.was destroyed by an incendiary bomb strike on the Hackney warehouse in which it was awaiting distribution. I treasure my own copy as much for the breezy Tyrwhitt-Glamis style as for her inventive recipes and her popular cry of ‘Buns Against Huns’.

Eat Your Greens

The characters are over-the-top, the plots are implausible and the outlandish misadventures a vehicle for dark farce and waspish observations on the absurdities of modern life including celebrities, classical musicians, garden centers, vegans, and Australian media moguls.

If intestinal detonation and a dinner party with spectacular projectile vomiting are not to your taste;  if the idea of consuming environmentalists (Eat your Greens), camp (the jittery leader of a boy band – Nanty Riah – is bald of course), and an opera about Princess Diana are steps too far, then these books are not for you. 

But then you would miss out on a collection of whacky characters and a literary romp of wordplay, non-sequiturs, malapropisms, parodies, and puns. Not to mention the intestinal puckering, rib-tickling food – Moth Broth, Vindaloo Blancmange, Blackberry and Mackerel Loaf – and the Samper pièce de résistance –  Badger Wellington with Gun-Dog Pâté, served with fungi foraged from the Tuscan forest… What could go wrong? 

As Gerald often comments – he is one of the Shropshire Sampers – and so, of course, we have some A.E. Housman. I can’t remember why. 

And then there’s the opera. Freed from the tyranny of ghostwriting for the rich and mediocre, Gerald is free to write his libretto with music by Marta. Here’s a chorus sample from Dilated Wench Inn (an anagram of the  Elton John song) that begins:

And it seems to me your life was like
A condom in a gale
Puffed rigid by publicity’s wind
And shrivelling when it failed

And so on, and so forth.