Low Life

had another go at getting into High Society by Ben Elton but after grinding through another 30 pages or so, this time i’m not going to bother going any further.. seems to be a completely pointless book.

it was like trying to eat a whole pack of rice cakes.. it’s vaguely palatable for the first one and half but then it just becomes more and more of a chore. By a third of the way through the last thing you’ll ever want is another rice cake.

Strange because the writing style is fluent, the subject matter & perspective on it were agreeable.. but it is a terrible book.

but everything is so monotonous, there is nothing addictive about the book whatsoever, the plotting so primitive and the characters so one-dimensional that i felt absolutely no curiosity about what happened next, turning each page was laborious.

it’s typical ranting, crusading Ben Elton without any humour and no grand imagination.. it is a work of hackery.

all the characters are garish stereotypes, vain politicians, hipocritical journalists, shallow drug addled celebs, upright policemen vs bent coppers, drug dealers more stupid and selfish than outright evil, poor unfortunate heroin addicts.. yes people like these do exist to some extent but to write a book which pushes such stereotypes so relentlessly and unremittingly is both lazy and incredibly cynical.. it merely perpetuates what it claims to hate.

and everything that happens to them is driven by the blunderbus narrative logic worthy of the worst straight to TV movie you could imagine.

When i first heard of the book, i assumed it was an novel set in a near future where all drugs had been legalised.. now if Ben Elton had turned his imagination & humour to that then he might have had some chance of writing a book i could have read..

Sadly he didn’t but what does he care?

About caspar

Caspar is just one monkey among billions. Battering his keyboard without expectations even of peanuts, let alone of aping the Immortal Bard. By day he is an infantologist at Birkbeck Babylab, by night he runs BabyLaughter.net
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One Response to Low Life

  1. Vanessa says:

    Ben Elton’s good for reminding yourself what really really crap writing reads like. End of.

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