LAURENCE STERNE was laid to rest in an unmarked pauper’s grave; but only briefly, because he was dug up again by the body-snatchers shortly afterwards, and sold for dissection. Somehow, it seems oddly appropriate that the author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, one of the oddest and greatest works of English literature, a madly digressive romp through the “history book of what passes in a man’s mind”, should end up in several very small parts, dispersed we know not where. I think Sterne, master of self-irony, would rather have enjoyed his own peculiar posthumous diffusion.

Tristram Shandy, a book long regarded as “unfilmable”, has now been made into a movie starring Steve Coogan, who plays the parts of Shandy, his father Walter, a character called “Steve Coogan” and, finally, himself. If that sounds about as far removed as could be from the one-dimensional verities of most Hollywood films, then that is as it should be, for the book (and film) are celebrations of a British virtue that has never translated into any other culture: eccentricity.

Sterne’s novel is a study in eccentricity. It has no plot worth the name. It leaps wilfully back and forth in time. The narrator himself is not even born until half way through. Sterne frequently resorts to lines of dashes, obscure asterisks and strange squiggles. When Parson Yorick dies, Sterne inserts two blacked-out pages, in mourning. He is forever rushing off down side-alleys of bawdy farce and misadventure, parodies and merry plagiarisms. Sterne broke all the literary rules. Nietzsche called him “the most liberated spirit of all time”. The young Marx wrote a novel in imitation.

Like all true comedy, Tristram Shandy has a tender undercurrent of sadness. The very name is a combination of tristesse and shandy, slang for “crazy”. Amid all the absurdity there is death, the “gutter of time” flowing on: “Time wastes too fast,” laments Shandy, “the days and hours of it . . . are flying over our heads like light clouds of a windy day, never to return more.”

A first work by an entirely obscure, middle-aged preacher in Yorkshire, Tristram Shandy became a huge bestseller when it was published in 1759. British readers recognised in it something of their own national character, a delight in the different. A dance, a soup and a racehorse (painted by George Stubbs) were each named after the central character. Ten years after publication, Samuel Johnson got it famously, utterly wrong: “Nothing odd will do long,” opined the doctor. “Tristram Shandy did not last.”

But last it did, and does, thanks to its very oddness. Sterne is claimed as the ancestor of “magical realism”; he also invented literary product placement, inserting a homage to Joshua Reynolds in the novel; Reynolds duly painted him. Parson Sterne earned a great deal of money, and spent a great deal more, ending up broke again.

Tristram Shandy is only one cult eccentric among a host of glorious British literary oddballs. Shakespeare and Chaucer abound with human oddities; Dickens revelled in the strangeness of Pickwick and Miss Havisham. Graham Greene caught the species precisely in the strange British characters who endure the horrors of Papa Doc’s Haiti in The Comedians. Think of Mr Toad, or Fiver in Watership Down or Nancy Mitford’s Uncle Matthew. Evelyn Waugh and P.G. Wodehouse elevated upper-class weirdness to high farce, for eccentricity is, on the whole, a luxury of the well-to-do.

By contrast there are few genuine eccentrics in American literature, and none that I can think of in European fiction. There are exhibitionists aplenty, but to be truly eccentric one must be unconscious of being different. Uncle Toby in Tristram Shandy is a genuine eccentric because though he spends his days re-enacting the 1695 Battle of Namur on the bowling green with scale models, he has no notion that this behaviour is in any way exceptional. Captain Ahab, on the hand, is mad and dangerous (and knows it), which is something else entirely.

Americans find eccentricity slightly threatening: witness the ridicule poured on poor, peculiar Ross Perot. The French find unorthodox habits and hobbies vulgar: have you ever spotted a French train-spotter? Why should Britain be the home to this rich history of eccentricity, literary and actual? Perhaps it is the weather, which encourages us to stay indoors (or, more often, inside the sheds we love) collecting thimbles and growing elaborate facial hair. Perhaps it is the formality of British manners and the rigidity of the class system that makes the oddities stand out. Often a veneer of genteel eccentricity is a mask, a way to avoid confrontation with reality, like Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. Yet we treasure the oddities. Indeed, the unofficial status of British National Treasure requires the patina of gentle eccentricity: Alan Bennett, Stephen Fry, John Betjeman.

We positively abhor the exhibitionist, who calls attention to himself. Anyone who plants, say, a huge fibreglass shark in his roof is not an eccentric but a wannabe extrovert, whereas the 18th-century 5th Earl of Portland, a man so shy he dug a series of private subterranean tunnels underneath his stately home, was the real thing.

John Stuart Mill reckoned that “the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour and moral courage which it contained”. But then, Mill never met my Great Aunt Lilly, whose habit of riding her horse upstairs had nothing to do with mental vigour and everything to do with convenience. She also did not think her behaviour remotely odd.

Sterne called his book “a conversation”, a definition of the novelist’s role that is hard to beat, but his ambitions were simple. “I wrote it to be famous,” he observed. As that delightful conversation shifts to the cinema for the first time, Tristram Shandy is about to be more famous than his creator could ever have imagined: a monument to British eccentricity, and a joke that has not staled in two and half centuries of telling.

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