The war on drugs. This issue is one that is never really going to be solved for a very long time and it’s fair to say that there really is only one ‘PC’ stance in the eyes of the British Public at the moment and that is to keep fighting the drug lords and punishing the users to the full extent ... Read review
Ben Elton's new novel High Society initially appears to be a cautionary tale about Britain ... more
today, but its vision of a society totally in thrall to criminality has elements of the visionary novel about it. Happily, the state of the nation is not (yet) q...
Postage & Packaging: £2.75 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
Ben Elton's new novelHigh Societyinitially appears to be a cautionary tale about Britain ... more
today, but its vision of a society totally in thrall to criminality has elements of the visionary novel about it. Happily, the state of the nation is not (yet) qui...
Postage & Packaging: £2.75 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
Ben Elton's new novel High Society initially appears to be a cautionary tale about Britain ... more
today, but its vision of a society totally in thrall to criminality has elements of the visionary novel about it. Happily, the state of the nation is not (yet) q...
Postage & Packaging: £2.75 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
Ben Elton's new novel High Society initially appears to be a cautionary tale about Britain ... more
today, but its vision of a society totally in thrall to criminality has elements of the visionary novel about it. Happily, the state of the nation is not (yet) q...
Postage & Packaging: £2.75 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
Ben Elton's new novelHigh Societyinitially appears to be a cautionary tale about Britain ... more
today, but its vision of a society totally in thrall to criminality has elements of the visionary novel about it. Happily, the state of the nation is not (yet) qui...
Postage & Packaging: £2.75 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
Ben Elton's new novel High Society initially appears to be a cautionary tale about Britain ... more
today, but its vision of a society totally in thrall to criminality has elements of the visionary novel about it. Happily, the state of the nation is not (yet) q...
Postage & Packaging: £2.75 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
Ben Elton's new novel High Society initially appears to be a cautionary tale about Britain ... more
today, but its vision of a society totally in thrall to criminality has elements of the visionary novel about it. Happily, the state of the nation is not (yet) q...
Postage & Packaging: £2.75 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
Advantages: Clever use of Characters, Layout, local dialects Disadvantages: You may not agree with the content, dialects!
...TV show through to his high profile Concerts and appearances at the Brits telling tales of drugs, sex and of course rock and roll. We follow the recent course of his life learning about the ups and downs of celebrity and how his alcoholism and drug use landed him in the meetings he attends.
Next we have Peter Paget, an ambitious Labour back bencher, happily married with two kids in an upmarket area of the country. Paget has a radical ... ...the support of someone very high up in the Police force and events happen that turns his private members bill into front page news and he gradually gets the support of the nation.
Jessie is a young runaway girl from Glasgow and we first meet her fresh of the bus in London. We follow her story as she is dragged into the world of prostitution after being given the chance to ‘just try’ some heroin. She starts off as a pimps whore however ... more
The war on drugs. This issue is one that is never really going to be solved for a very long time and it’s fair to say that there really is only one ‘PC’ stance in the eyes of the British Public at the moment and that is to keep fighting the drug lords and punishing the users to the full extent of the law.
Enter five stereotypical characters from across the nation who are placed to show how drug use (or misuse) is a central part of life in the UK at the moment.
First we are introduced to Tommy Hanson. The darling of the UK music scene tells his story from the chair in an AA meeting and goes from his humble beginnings winning a ‘Pop Stars’ like TV show through to his high profile Concerts and appearances at the Brits telling tales of drugs, sex and of course rock and roll. We follow the recent course of his life learning about the ups and downs of celebrity and how his alcoholism and drug use landed him in the meetings he attends.
Next we have Peter Paget, an ambitious Labour back bencher, happily married with two kids in an upmarket area of the country. Paget has a radical stance on the war against drugs where he wants to legalise the whole lot but has no luck getting any backing in this until he is given the opportunity to introduce a private members bill to parliament. He takes this as the chance to put his point across however the day it is announced two children die from accidentally swallowing ecstasy tablets and he has to defend himself to the hilt. He does get the support of someone very high up in the Police force and events happen that turns his private members bill into front page news and he gradually gets the support of the nation.
Jessie is a young runaway girl from Glasgow and we first meet her fresh of the bus in London. We follow her story as she is dragged into the world of prostitution after being given the chance to ‘just try’ some heroin. She starts off as a pimps whore however after trying to escape her hell we see her ending up in much worse circumstances, battling with some seriously dodgy people as well as her full time drug addiction.
A Brummie girl called Sonia is introduced to us from the Hilton Hotel in Bangkok as she enjoys a free holiday organised in return for the use of her gut to transport a large quantity of heroin to her home country. She is at first very proud of the entrepreneur in her until pf course she ends up in a Thai jail on drug smuggling charges. We follow her experience with in the jail and her contact with the British Ambassador and just how powerless they are to help a person in this predicament.
After Peter Paget names the Police support he has, we are taken to the home of Commander Barry Leman where his wife receives a threatening phone call from an mystery caller who demands that Leman withdraws his support for the Paget bill or there would be dire circumstances. As the caller knows the identity of his daughter and where she goes to school his wife is understandably upset by this call. Leman thinks he knows who this is however and believes it is just idle threats however circumstances take an unexpected turn and his support in Paget is tested to its limits.
I very much enjoyed this book. I found the layout of the story to keep me very much intrigued by what would happen next. There are no chapters as such, the story moves to different locations and this sometimes happens after many pages or just a couple of paragraphs. I enjoyed how Elton linked each character to each other at certain points and how we saw each situation through the different eyes of the characters in question.
The characters themselves while very believable, were obviously based on certain characters in real life, and at times it was a bit difficult to actually concentrate on Tommy Hanson for example, and not think “that is SO Robbie Williams”. While I do believe it was a good idea to have each character ‘speak’ in their own accents, I found this a bit hard to get used to at first – even the Glasweigen Jessie to which I have a lot of experience in trying to understand – however it does allow Elton to utilise local colloquialisms to great effect when characters are describing their experiences.
I think the only character I could properly sympathise with was the Jessie character as I felt that her situation was a lot more genuine and not in any way her fault whereas the others had things to answer for in their choices through the storyline.
I very much agree with the subject matter in the book and feel that Elton did a very admiral job in getting across this viewpoint and would hope that this book will, while fiction, open up the minds of quite a few people that the war on drugs was lost years ago and it is time to look at other options to try and make the country a safer and better place to live. His choice of characterisation did very well in highlighting that it is more than likely people will know at least one person who is in some capacity, a drug user.
I have never read any other Ben Elton books but I felt that his use of political issues worked extremely well and I am currently on the look out for another of his books. He really does make a very good case for the legalisation of all drugs however I was an easy audience for that. I am not sure how someone who is of a different viewpoint would react to the very radical viewpoint however I think that as long as this book is approached with an open mind, I would think that almost anyone would find at least something about the book interesting, if not to exactly agree with it.
I have decided to give it four stars here because I did find it very enjoyable, it did make me turn each page with vigour, however I feel that there will be some people who will take great offence at the subject matter and some may find the regional dialects difficult to read.
The book is available from amazon.co.uk at £5.59 which I think is a fair price.
Advantages: An honest and thought provoking book. Very well written. Disadvantages: Very controversial and totally unsuitable for children.
Shock horror He did it again! This is my favourite Ben Elton Book (and I've read a few). I just love his bare faced honesty. He doesn't seem to care at all about controversy and if people may be offended by what he writes. He thinks these things so he writes these things and I wish other authors could grow a spine and do the same. This is the first one of his books I read and I have been hooked ever since.
Anyway onto the book itself. The story ... ...its stupidity and the law. The main subject is drugs but Elton has incorporated these other issues to get the reader thinking around the subject. Each issue is a separate story line. This may sound confusing but it really isn't at all. Each story is easily followed and each character and stage of events is memorable enough to make the book pretty easy to read. It's not one of those books that you need a dictionary to understand. It was written to ...
nereesa85 24.01.2007
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of High Society - Ben Elton
...I plucked his latest novel, High Society, from the supermarket shelves I approached it with an open mind and looked forward to a rollocking good read with a bit of food-for-thought thrown in for good measure.
High Society is about the war on drugs and the fact that it is well and truly lost. Like the film and TV series Traffic, it presents drugs and their personal and societal effects from a variety of perspectives and forms a map of a world paying ... ...to infiltrate all levels of the social strata and take control.
The novel centers around five different characters whose lives are ruled by drugs:
Peter Paget MP is in favour of the legalisation of all drugs. He sees that the war against them can never be won and believes that the only way to minimize the harm they do is to take them out of the hands of the violent criminals who control and peddle them.
Commander Barry Leman also believes in legalisation. ...
sandrabarber 20.10.2003
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of High Society - Ben Elton
Advantages: Fast paced and well structured Disadvantages: Not as funny as some of his other work
...excess of Hollywood and in High Society he takes on the challenge of the legalisation of drugs in the UK.
The story itself is told through a series of characters all of who become linked at various times through the common interest of drugs and the impact they have had on their lives. The story opens with rock superstar Tommy Hanson explaining his recent antics at the Brit Awards to his fellow group members at an AA meeting, Hanson himself who shot ... ...sort of composite of Liam Gallagher with his Manc rhetoric and Robbie Williams based upon his lifestyle and boy band credentials, in fact using characters that have a more than passing resemblance to those in real life is a feature of this book, in fact Elton covers this by mentioning the similarities himself. In Peter Paget the crusading MP whose Private Members Bill brings the issue of legalisation into the public domain you have a number of similarities ...
atticusuk 10.06.2007
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of High Society - Ben Elton
Advantages: Ben Elton is a genius... Disadvantages: Never want to put his books down...time consuming!
...the law does not prosecute high profile people, as the can fford to check themselves into rehab clinics atc and leave a few weeks later claiming they are clean...
However, Jessie's story shows the bottom end of the scale, where again, the law often fails to prosecute, but also fails to protect the vulnerable individuals involved in the drug-fuelled world from further abuse and problems...
The comedy aspect of the book most definately comes from ... ...a serious problem, and Elton again has you wondering, if this were to happen in real life, would this proposed idea of full legalisation work? and after the arguments he presents through his characters, i have to say personally, yes it would! as one line of the book says, "who cares if there are a few more addicts in Britain, so long as you're not having your video nicked" and it is a fair point!
Anyway, I've done enough talking, so I wll leave ...
classact39 28.04.2005
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of High Society - Ben Elton
Advantages: Easy to read Disadvantages: A little dull at times
...same follows with the novel High Society. This is a story centred around the legalisation of all drugs and the effect that drugs have on today's society, in their current illegal status. The story depicts how the use (and abuse) of drugs is pivotal in many differing lives, ranging from a back-bench politician, who is for all intents and purposes ignored through to the teenage heroin addict forced to sell herself for the next fix. *** THE CHARACTERS ... ...of "Pop Hero" and is as arrogant and idiotic as they come. His life revolves around drinking, taking drugs and sleeping with as many women (and occassionally men) as possible. He is famous, adored by thousands and completely wasting his life. He is without a doubt modelled on a cross between the Gallagher brothers and Robbie Williams (although Elton is quick to refute this by using the names of the real-life rockstars in his story) and his character ...
sunworld 28.08.2004
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of High Society - Ben Elton
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Advantages: fantastic story - fast pace - really good read! Disadvantages: none!!
they were real people at one point! & even started feeling genuine sympathy for them!!.. I think BenElton has done a fantastic job of this - as soon as i read this book i went out and got 'HighSociety' which is equally as amazing as this!! ...
Advantages: construction, style, satire Disadvantages: lack of wider picture, unrealistic and unlikeable main character
somewhere between William Gibson’s ‘Pattern Recognition’; Martin Amis’ ‘Money’ and BenElton’s ‘HighSociety’. It is decidedly better written than Elton (worse than the other two though), has definitely less obnoxious protagonists than ‘Money’ and falls very short of the way Gibson managed to put his finger on the pulse of today. To me it lacked breadth and wider picture as well as trying to make me feel sorry for a narrow, self-centred character whose misery seemed to me very much self-inflicted. And I don’t believe in redeeming power of love, so the resolution offered was entirely unconvincing.
On the other hand it was intricately constructed, has fairly compelling story, well designed secondary characters, interesting imagery and rather wonderful, scathing description ...
Advantages: Great characters, amusing Disadvantages: not hard to put down
back ground with Chart Throb written in neon lighting and a huge microphone. If you didn't already know what the book was about it would make you pick it up at least to have a read of the blurb.
The Author
BenElton has had a vast career not only has he wrote award winning TV shows, Young Ones and Blackadder , to name a couple he is himself a hugely successful stand up comic. He has written three hit westend plays, Gasping, Silly Cow and Popcorn (based on his novel). He wrote and directed the film Maybe Baby (based on his novel Inconceivable) and written three stage musicals including We Will Rock You which he created with Queen.
By The Same Author
Novels:
Stark
Gridlock
The Other Eden
Popcorn
Blast from The Past
Inconceivable
Dead Famous
HighSociety
Past Mortem
The First Casualty
Blind Faith
Plays:
Gasping
Silly ...