High Society - Ben Elton > Reviews > Play it again, Ben, and again...

Author's product rating:   

Advantages:	Sometimes very moving, occasional funny moments
Disadvantages:	Forgets that it's meant to be a novel

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

About six years ago, I read a book called Gridlock. It was the first I had read by a man whose stand up comedy I had not been that keen on (probably too young), but who was also partly responsible for the hilarious Blackadder (probably a tad precocious). Gridlock was pretty good- unconventional, sharp, funny. So over the next six years, I read more of Ben Elton’s books. Some were better than others, all were imaginative, but unfortunately it was becoming ever more apparent that they were also getting increasingly tiresome. High Society has finally made me decide I probably won’t be reading any more.

First the plot. Elton structures his books as multi-dimensional approaches to a societal problem (not a bad thing, on the whole, but it can get exhausting), this time drug culture and the criminal justice system. It is an episodic narrative, tracing the interwoven lives of various people from all corners of life, mainly: Peter Paget, a backbench MP with an audacious plan to revolutionise drug taking under the law, Jessie, a steely young Scottish girl forced into heroin addiction and prostitution, Tommy Hanson “Pop Hero” winner and the man to out-Robbie Robbie (aka a character sketch of said Mr. Williams so thinly veiled as to not be veiled at all), Sonia, a seemingly tough Brummie lass learning about the Thai drug laws the hard way, and Commander Barry Leman, a Met officer trying to rid the police of corruption and instead having it land on his doorstep.

Since the book is character rather than plot-driven, it would seem that Elton’s gift for character development would have free reign here. And sometimes it does. Barry Leman, the most simple and moving of the cast, is the most human and beautifully drawn. Peter Paget is also a well-rendered figure, whose vibrant speeches echo poor old Digby in Gridlock. But Elton’s stereotypes, where he really goes to town, lampooning all the way, are so caricatured that it makes the book uneven- unrealistic OTT types like Tommy Hanson sitting rather uncomfortably next to someone like Leman. This isn’t helped by the fact that speeches figure heavily in all Elton’s books. The stand up comic never quite goes away, so at every opportunity, someone is giving a speech- Paget to parliament, Hanson to Alcoholics Anonymous (though not in his case), Jessie to the woman on the bus. Sometimes these are strident and funny, sometimes they’re moving and sweet. Often, especially in the case of Sonia and Jessie, they’re annoying because the accents are included phonetically, and somehow that distracts from the character rather than adding to it. And whether he knows he’s doing it or not, when Elton adds unlikely eloquence to their words, he makes them sound less like articulate, intelligent individuals and more like people reading a script.

Nevertheless, there are good moments. Perhaps because this is where Elton drops his guard and lets his heart and humanity in, the most brutal parts are also the most gripping. Both Jessie’s description of cold turkey in a prison-like brothel, and Leman’s terror at a truly horrific deliberate attack on a friend of his daughter’s are moving pieces of writing that really strike at the core of what drugs are doing to this country and to the people in it through the criminal culture. It seems that Elton’s idea might be Paget’s, which is to legalise every single type of drug and control drug use through the medical system, freeing up police crime and slashing through the criminal underground, which should then no longer exist. Whether or not that would work, I leave up to you to decide, but the darker parts of the book scream out that something needs to be done. Unfortunately, the rest of the book becomes so tiresome and formulaic, that you begin to forget the point. Perhaps it’s better if you’ve never read one of his books before. These days they all follow the same pattern, and the shock reversals and falls coming fast on the heels of pride, are entirely predictable. This feels like a pale imitation of his earlier work, just switching the subject and jiggling the characters a bit.

Don’t get me wrong, some repetition is a good thing. My favourite author is John Irving, and no one can accuse him of never going back to the same themes. But that’s just the point. The same themes, as Irving once pointed out himself, can move and interest again and again- if something gets to you once, why shouldn’t it the next time? But whereas The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules and The Hotel New Hampshire have, at moments, overlapping themes and settings, they are very different books. Because what Elton is moving swiftly towards is a bizarre situation where theme and plot are different but somehow, in an intangible but important way, it’s the same old story. And that to me is just not worth the effort.

But can I look at this book objectively, and tell you whether it is good without naturally comparing it to what has come before? I’ll try. I think I would have been put off this book anyway by its rather leering sexual nature. It’s always been obvious that Ben Elton is obsessed with sex, and in many ways it’s the perfect subject for comedy- universal and easily made ridiculous. But his constant lingering on how beautiful taut young women are, be it Tommy’s girlfriend, Peter’s assistant, or Jessie, is a little creepy. There’s a dirty old man with a mackintosh feel to it- no one expects men (or women) to stop noticing sexy young things when they’re older, but forgive me if I don’t want to have to see them drooling. A certain affair in the book reads a little too much like a fantasy. And this is alongside the repeated references to the fact that some heroin addicts inject into their genitalia. It’s true, but why the constant reminders? It’s grim, but repeating that kind of brutal image only makes us immune to it in the end. Elton wants to titillate with G-strings and then horrify with pimps and rapists, and although it’s an effective ploy, it makes me feel a little nauseous. I thought more than once of giving up, but I have this thing about finishing every book I start if I can possibly bring myself to do it.

If there is anything worth reading this book for, it’s the stories of Barry Leman and Jessie, which are truly unpredictable, human and moving. Otherwise, Tommy Hanson is only mildly less grating than Robbie Williams (if only because I know Hanson isn’t real) and Paget is just another man whose very ordinariness swamps all that is exceptional in him- not in itself an uninteresting idea, but a bit too familiar to be really exciting.

As a record of just some of the results of drug culture in today’s society, this is interesting. As an attempt to put forward solutions, this is audacious. As a novel, however, it’s pretty poor and sensationalist. If he’d simply made a documentary or given an honest account of his opinions in a newspaper article or television debate, it would have made for wonderful viewing or reading. As it is, I can’t recommend it. And why it was given the W.H. Smith’s People’s Choice award, I’ll never know.

Thanks for reading, Alex :)