High Society - Ben Elton > Reviews > Rock star in drug taking surprise

Author's product rating:   

Advantages:	Fast paced and well structured
Disadvantages:	Not as funny as some of his other work

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

Ben Elton has often used relatively easy soft targets for his biting black humour both in his live act and his comedy writing, past books have focused on the attention seeking reality TV of Big Brother or the 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 to fame via a Pop Idol style show is a 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 to the disgraced former MP Jonathon Aitkin and Emily the posh IT girlfriend of Tommy could be anyone of the Tara Palmer long posh name bird or Kate Moss crowd. There are other characters featured, Jessie the teenage runaway who is hooked on heroin working for a pimp, Sonia who is in a Bangkok prison on drug smuggling charges and police Commander Lehman an out spoken supporter of Paget and intent on investigating police corruption.

In typical Elton style this is a fast paced story and is certainly worth reading, the action flickers from character to character and while initially there is a retrospective style of story telling it soon leaps ahead of itself and then back again, one of the methods used to great effect by the author is to have sections where one of the characters particularly Jessie is telling her story to another character as an event happening in the past and then the story is progressed by actually filling in the blanks with actual sections of her actually living through the events, it is a clever style that helps keep the reader on their toes and introduces a nice touch of variety as you sort of know that a character reaches a certain point in the story but cannot be entirely sure how they got there without the bits of the puzzle being filled in.

The humour in this book can be quite dark, in fact out of all of the books I have read by Elton I would say that this one has the least number of laughs within it, it has a grim story line and certainly does nothing to promote or glorify the taking of drugs instead focusing on the impact they have on peoples lives ad the way that even those with good intentions are influenced and corrupted by their effects.

This was an easy book to pick up and a hard one to put down, small punchy chapters and the constant switching between characters helps maintain momentum and keeps pages turning. Some readers may find it difficult as the language switches to the regional accent of the story teller, not a problem for the middle England of Paget and Lehman but the Glasgow phrases of Jessie and Manc slang of Tommy took a while but if you can cope with an Irvine Welsh novel then this one presents no real challenge.

At times Elton presents a quite convincing case for the legalisation of all drugs, the politicians hook line of “so what if there are more drug addicts, would you care if legalisation meant they did not need to rob your house or mug your granny to fund their habit as it was all legal” can be quite convincing and one of the things I like about this book is that it does make you think about some of the issues surrounding the trade in drugs and just how many people might have a vested interest in ensuring that it does remain illegal.

I found all of the characters in the book to be based within the realms of reality and unlike other books by Elton I was able to not only identify with some of them but actually found myself hoping for a happy ending for some of them. Often there are none of his characters that have any redeeming features but in this case there were a number of different victims and overall it was a lot harsher storyline that is told. The book does focus on the short comings of the human race and the fact that the majority of people are focused on their own self interest, as you would expect politicians are not shown in the most positive light but then they do that everyday in the commons and the press anyway.

I certainly found this a difficult book to put down and I found the writing to be intelligent, scathing and provoked a certain amount of soul searching on my own part, a reaction I did not expect when I first picked it up. I would certainly recommend it however I still think that Dead Famous is my favourite of his books but this one is a class act. I would only avoid giving it five stars mainly because I do not think it is a book that I would particularly want to read again.

Published by Black Swan the rrp is £6.99 however it is available on Amazon for £5.29 new or from a penny in the new and used section. I got my copy from readitswapit.co.uk where it will shortly be available again from me. The ISBN is 0-552-99995-4 and it runs to 380 pages.

Thanks for reading and rating my review.