Ben Elton: High Society

Reviewed by PETER CALDER

Ben Elton's the kind of furiously prolific pop culture polymath who could make a bestseller if he published his shopping lists. Not content with re-landscaping British television comedy as co-writer of The Young Ones and Blackadder, he has written three West End plays and seven previous novels.

Never mind the quality, feel the width. The 1999 film Maybe Baby, based on his own book Inconceivable was, as he might have said if he hadn't directed it, bollocks. And his early novels flew across my lounge quarter-read when I lost patience with their arcane plotting, mysterious punctuation and dismal grasp of elementary semantics.

His new novel doesn't deserve to work either, though doubtless it will. Roughly plotted and littered with two-dimensional characters whose clunky expository dialogue sounds like it's cribbed from school essays, it's meant to be a hip and hard-nosed look at drug culture but it's rather cloyingly sentimental.

The writing style is film-script-ready, a long string of scenes, each with a heading announcing the location, between which he cuts with a bewildering rapidity which almost disguises his inability to sustain plotting or character interaction for more than a few pages. But it's written with such passion and energy that it drags even the unimpressed reader along.

Its central character is Labour backbencher Peter Paget whose function is to advance the book's political subtext: that the downstream problems caused by illegal drug use make the immediate legalisation of all recreational drugs the only sensible option. A minutely contrived concatenation of circumstances drags him and his campaign into the political and media spotlight and Elton throws in a handful of other character cliches (a coked-out and libidinous pop star, a Scottish crack whore, an ambitious and emotionally confused parliamentary private secretary and some remarkably lifelike tabloid journalists) whose lives briefly or nearly intersect with the main storyline.

Elton is plainly well-informed about his subject and he sprinkles sly wisecracks through the text at everyone from Robbie Williams and Eric Clapton to Tony Blair's minder Alistair Campbell (though no tabloid would repeat the infamous Gotcha! headline, particularly in the circumstances where Elton has used it). But he's a writer in a rush, whose vigour fails to conceal an irritating technical sloppiness. Plainly he can now afford an editor who knows the difference between a comma and a full stop, but he needs one who can rescue him from misquoting Hamlet and using "pedal" when he means "peddle" or "agonised" when he means "distressed".

What ultimately stops a readable novel from being good, or even particularly interesting, is a cop-out ending which drags the plot off track. Paget is derailed not by a conspiracy of any power elite but by his own rather grubby stupidity. He, Elton's agenda and the reader all deserved a better fate.

* Peter Calder is an Auckland journalist.

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