Ancestral Vices is a 1980 satirical novel by Tom Sharpe, that focuses on the foibles of the English upper-class.
The story focuses on the Petrefacts, an elite but eccentric and obscure family. Lord Ronald Petrefact, a successful aristocrat with a distinct contempt for his family, hires academic Walden Yapp to compile a history of his family as an act of spite. Yapp heads down to the Petrefact family town of Buscott to start his research, and finds himself up against the Petrefact family, led by Ronald’s younger sister Emmelia, who seeks to put a stop to Yapp’s investigations. Meanwhile, Ronald’s estranged son Frederick has established himself as a successful businessman in Buscott, but is hiding a dark secret that is threatened by Yapp’s arrival.
Yapp himself finds himself thrown for a loop when he stays at a bed-and-breakfast run by Rosie Coppett, a large beautiful woman and her dwarf husband Willy. Yapp finds himself attracted to Rosie, which arouses jealousy in Willy. But things come to a head when Willy is found dead and Yapp is arrested. How did the crime happen? What will happen to Yapp and the Petrefacts?
This novel contains examples of:
- Accidental Murder: Mr Jipson ends up running over Willy Coppett, who was blind drunk and never saw the tractor coming.
- Ambition Is Evil: Lord Petrefact’s ambition and attaining a title ostracized him from his relations. Though they aren’t any much different from him, and cling to their obscurity only as a shield.
- Antagonistic Offspring: Frederick Petrefact to his father. A minor version, since both are too distant for any major confrontations or drama.
- Aristocrats Are Evil: Lord Petrefact is the villain of the story, but the Petrefacts overall are a selfish, egocentric bunch. The novel itself is a satire on the English upper-class of the 1970s and their abuse of power.
- Bittersweet Ending: Lord Petrefact dies, and Yapp is freed from prison while Rosie gets a job as a maid in Emmelia’s house. But the Petrefact family gets off scot free for their deeds, and show no sign of repentance or even regret over them.
- Break the Haughty: This happens to both Emmelia and Yapp. Emmelia is subject to abuse from her own family for allowing Frederick to run a sex toy factory, causing her suffer massive disillusionment. Yapp gets framed and thrown in prison for a murder he didn’t commit, causing all his academic beliefs to smash.
- Character Development: Emmelia Petrefact and Walden Yapp go through this, both learning that the world is a chaotic place that doesn’t let reason reign, and allows bad people to triumph and good people to suffer. Each reacts to this in a different way: Emmelia tries to rebel against this, but eventually accepts it in order to keep some power and control in her life. Yapp on the other hand finds comfort in thinking only of himself above any intellectual ideas that are ultimately insignificant.
- Cluster F-Bomb:Lord Petrefact made noises which seemed to signify that Professor F***ing Yapp could stuff his f***ing case where the f***ing monkey stuffed the f***ing nuts.
- Dirty Coward: Emmelia discovers that at their core, her Petrefact relatives are this. Without their status and secrecy, they are no better than anyone else and in fact are less than that with their sordid eccentricities. The only ones with any sort of courage are Emmelia herself and her brother Ronald (and Frederick), but even they are limited by how much they can do and by blood must yield to their family loyalty.
- Even Evil Has Standards: The Petrefacts, an unsavory bunch, are shocked at Frederick Petrefact having started up a sex toy factory. It’s less about how depraved it is than how shocked people will be on learning about it.
- The prisoners Yapp meets in prison assume Yapp is a child-killer, because of his incarceration for murdering a little person. Somewhat subverted by him being framed for it.
- Evil Cripple: Lord Petrefact is confined to a wheelchair.
- Evil Old Folks: Lord Petrefact is about eighty years old.
- Food Porn: Lord Petrefact invokes this by ordering an eight-course meal for Yapp to indulge his ideas about how rich people have luxurious banquets. This includes sucking pig, turtle soup involving a genuine turtle shell, and dessert wine for the whole course.
- A Fool for a Client: Yapp tries to represent himself in court.
- Groin Attack: A distinctly sordid example: a female dwarf when targeted for rape, bites off her attacker’s penis. Good thing it was an artificial one.
- Had to Come to Prison to Be a Crook: Yapp, who was framed and sent to prison, ends up feigning madness to get respect there.
- Happily Married: To everyone’s surprise and slight disbelief, Willy and Rosie Coppett. Despite their physical proportions giving Willy grief when it comes to sex, they’re comfortable with each other.
- Innocence Lost: Emmelia Petrefact goes through this throughout the novel. After witnessing her family's selfishness and cowardice, she tries to act for good on her own through arranging a criminal campaign that should get her arrested and Yapp freed, but ultimately is pressured/bribed by her family into keeping silent, with their influence being able to keep her out of prison despite her campaign.
- Jerkass Realization: Emmelia realizes that as a Petrefact, she is just as nasty and ruthless as her brother Ronald.
- Kangaroo Court: The Petrefacts set this up for Yapp.
- Karma Houdini: Mr Jipson, an ordinary citizen who accidentally runs over Willy Coppett with his tractor, drops the body in Yapp’s car to hide what he did, and when Yapp is arrested for Willy’s murder, he keeps his head down and his mouth shut. All that he really suffers by this are some mild panic attacks, where he repeatedly cleans his tractor. At the end of the story Rosie hears gossip about him putting the tractor on sale.
- The Petrefacts end up as untouchable and elite as ever.
- Meaningful Name: The ill-fated 'Willy Coppett'.
- Mistaken for Cheating: Everyone assumes that Yapp and Rosie Coppett are having an affair, including Rosie's husband Willy and the Petrefacts.
- Moral Myopia: The Petrefacts are less considered with how horrific their actions are, than how embarrassing their exposure will be. Judge Petrefact justifies this somewhat by explaining that without their upper-class status to give them respectability and obscurity, their influence is non-existent.
- Frederick Petrefact muses on how the English morality considers masturbation worse than murder.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Emmelia gave her nephew Frederick a free hand to make himself a successful Petrefact. He achieves this by building a sex toy factory right under her nose.
- Police Are Useless: The police do their best to get to the bottom of the mess the Petrefacts cause, but stuck for clues and faced with political pressure from the Petrefact family, they have to give up.
- Poor Communication Kills: An Italian chef who asked for a “big fucking pig” to cook for dinner ends up getting a boar built for breeding.
- Later on the chef mistakenly gives the impression that the said pig was meant for sexual intercourse.
- A female bureaucrat from a Marriage agency visits Rosie and, not knowing she’s married to a dwarf or that the marriage is a content one, advises Rosie that if she’s being denied sexual rights she should engage in extramarital affairs. This is what leads her to make an advance on Yapp.
- Prison Rape: It's strongly implied that this was done to Yapp during his time in prison.
- Serial Killings, Specific Target: Inverted. Emmelia, the only one convinced that Walden Yapp didn't murder the diminutive Willy Coppett, sets out on a spree of attempting to kidnap other Persons of Restricted growth to make it appear that the culprit is still at large.
- Servile Snarker: Lord Petrefact’s valet Croxley holds a thinly-veiled antagonistic relationship with his master, and the two engage in a duel of wills and snark at every opportunity.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Emmelia tries to get Yapp free by herself by embarking on a campaign of serial attacks on dwarves to enable people to think there is a dwarf killer about.
- Tiny Guy, Huge Girl: An extreme case with the dwarf Willy Coppett and his gigantic wife Rosie.
- Title Drop: At one point in the story Emmelia goes to sleep thinking of a line about “ancestral vices prophesying war”.
- Town with a Dark Secret: Buscott, the Petrefact ancestral town. though the secret – a sex toy factory is being run in secret - is more embarrassing than deadly, it’s still the kind of secret that can do major damage.
- Unishment: Yapp is transferred to an open prison, where he settles in and is reluctant to be paroled.
- Villain with Good Publicity: The Petrefacts rely on their vices being covered with status and influence.
