The First Casualty - Ben Elton

The First Casualty – Ben Elton
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Firstly, a confession. I didn’t mean to buy this book; I wanted the Elton book about the reality TV show (Dead Famous) and picked this up by mistake and didn’t realise the error until I started reading the first pages. I mention this because one of the joys of reading is the anticipation you feel before starting a new book and realising this wasn’t the book I ...
...of it, particularly in the first few days of reading.

Ben Elton doesn’t really need much of an introduction as one of the things he is most famous for is how prolific he is. He’s written several sitcoms, hosted Saturday Night Live and enjoyed a successful stand up career. He’s scripted a number of West End plays and written a string of best seller books. There’s not much I don’t like about Ben Elton and his work and having read a couple ... more

The First Casualty – Ben Elton
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Firstly, a confession. I didn’t mean to buy this book; I wanted the Elton book about the reality TV show (Dead Famous) and picked this up by mistake and didn’t realise the error until I started reading the first pages. I mention this because one of the joys of reading is the anticipation you feel before starting a new book and realising this wasn’t the book I wanted set me back and may have influenced my thoughts of it, particularly in the first few days of reading.

Ben Elton doesn’t really need much of an introduction as one of the things he is most famous for is how prolific he is. He’s written several sitcoms, hosted Saturday Night Live and enjoyed a successful stand up career. He’s scripted a number of West End plays and written a string of best seller books. There’s not much I don’t like about Ben Elton and his work and having read a couple of his early novels several years ago I was looking forward to getting reacquainted.

The story is set during World War One and revolves around Douglas Kingsley, an inspector with the Metropolitan Police. When we first meet Kingsley he is on trial for being a conscientious objector. An intelligent and articulate man he is also rather arrogant and his logical and moral defence alienates the court and he is sent to Wormwood Scrubs, a far tougher internment than most objectors receive and not a good place for a former police inspector to find himself. Via an unsympathetic warden and vengeful guard Kingsley is forced to share a cell with three violent criminals with whom he is only too familiar seeing as he is the one who had them convicted in the first place. With the warders turning a blind eye he is subjected to vicious beatings and as he begins his third stint in the prison hospital he knows that he must somehow escape or he will surely be dead sooner rather than later.

At the same time in Flanders a decorated war hero who is recuperating from shell shock is shot dead. A bolshie private with whom the officer had earlier had an altercation stands accused of the crime but the facts don’t add up and a public relations disaster that could destroy morale at home and at the front is looming. The army needs to resolve the problem quickly and quietly. With a new identity Kingsley is sent to the front to carry out the investigation and is faced with the full horrors of war. With witnesses dying and evidence being lost he has a race against time if he is to find the killer.

Not having read any of his work for several years I may have missed the direction his writing has taken recently but while I expected the book to be funny, or at least satirical, it is neither and is in fact a fairly straightforward character piece. When Ben Elton writes a novel about WWI it is hard to ignore all the baggage and preconceptions that you have from the Blackadder Goes Forth series and this casts quite a large shadow that is hard to shake of for several chapters. You keep expecting to hear echoes of that comedy in the characters or the dialogue but he steers well clear. In one scene early in the book a company CO is addressing his officers at a regimental dinner and states that he is proud to be serving with them and that he ‘couldn’t wish to go forward with a finer body of men’. You’re just crying out for someone to pipe up with ‘soon to be fine bodies of men’ but of course no one does.
It’s impossible to know how hard Elton finds it to write without throwing in some gags or the odd ludicrous character but while the story doesn’t contain any jokes that I can recall it doesn’t reach any great depths of darkness or pathos either. Rather it coasts along at a gentle pace, never really generating any urgency or excitement along the way.

The book isn’t bad but I found myself disappointed for several reasons. As a historical novel it falls short of the level of detail you would normally expect and you learn nothing new of the times. As crime fiction there aren’t enough twists or surprises to keep you guessing, in fact you can pretty well see the path the book will follow and who did what by about half way through. What’s left is a character piece, but again it falls short as most of the characters are never really fleshed out and have no real depth. I would almost call it a lazy book and I don’t think Elton spent a lot of time researching it. That’s not to say it’s ill-informed, he is a pretty clever and well read man and would not be guilty of that, it’s just that it feels as if it were written off the cuff.

The characterisation is surprisingly generous and no one is mocked or satirised. Even the aristocratic officers, so often the butt of jokes in Blackadder, are treated here with reverence and the ones we meet are brave, enthusiastic and loved by their men. The narrative only comes alive when describing several infantry attacks on the German lines and Elton captures the panic, fear and bravery passionately. These passages reminded me of ‘Birdsong’ by Sebastian Faulks, an otherwise turgid book that contained a spellbinding description of infantry charges and trench warfare.

I’ve been quite critical about this book but really all I can say is that it passed the time and nothing more, it trickles along to a predictable conclusion and personally I like my books to have a bit more about them than that. 

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