Ben Elton

Time And Time AgainI bought "Time And Time Again" because Ben Elton wrote it and because the cover art (unlike the title) is original and intriguing.

What I got was initially a lot of fun but finally became something brutal, depressing, and horribly plausible.

I was so surprised that, as I finished the book, I found myself feeling angry at Ben Elton for having broken the implicit contract between writer and reader about the type of experience I'd signed up for. If I'd reviewed the book right show more then, it would have pitched between a confused "WTF was that?" and a disappointed "How could he do that to me?"

Fortunately, I didn't have time to write anything right away because, as the days passed, I couldn't get the book out of my head and I started to understand what Ben Elton had really done.

To be honest, I wish he hadn't done it but you can't unread a book and I can't undo the fact that Ben Elton has abraded my smug view of history as a narrative and left me with something raw and bleeding and much less romantic.

Normally, I enjoy the time travel trope. Who doesn't want to speculate on how things would have turned out "if only"? Normally, I expect a spectacle of altered cause and changed effect that move quickly enough to keep me dizzy and off balance while feeling slightly smug about knowing (at least some of) the history and getting a vicarious tingle from the new possibilities.

"Time And Time Again" starts off like that. in 2025, our hero, an ex-SAS Captain with a degree in history from Trinity College Cambridge, a flair for languages, and a tragedy in his recent past that has destroyed his will to live, is recruited by his old History Professor to take advantage of a once-in-a-lifetime chance to travel back to 1914 and stop the Great War.

The details are original and fun, so I won't share them here but in a relatively short time our twenty-first century Captain is in Istanbul in 1914, bumping up against the obnoxious behaviour of privileged Brits and trying to move west without being noticed. He has to sit on his anger at the Brits of the day because not to do so would put his mission, to save the world from a war that would destroy a generation, at risk.

The fun continues when, travelling west on the Orient Express, he meets a young Irish Suffragette and falls instantly in lust. The exchanges between them made me laugh out loud. He can't keep twenty-first century idioms out of his speech and she is swept away by his New Man views on sexual equality. When he quotes the yet-to-exist Mao and say that "Women hold up half the sky" she practically wants to take him where he sits.

At this point, I settled down into the book, thinking I'd found a romance/thriller that would turn out to be a John Buchanan style ripping good read.

I should have remembered that I was reading Ben Elton. His books are never that simple.

As the story progressed. I started to feel less and less comfortable with Our Her0's certainty that he was right and that the mission to save the world justified any action he needed to take and any casualties that might be suffered along the way, but I was still wrapped up in the thriller aspects of the plot. I wanted to know what happened next. I wanted to know how he pulled it off.

As more and more things started to go wrong, I could see less and less ways for Our Hero to win. I got all the way to the point where Ben Elton stepped outside Our Hero's narrative to reframe the story before it occurred to me that, maybe, winning hadn't been the real objective of the story.

The last section of the book, after the reframing, is shocking, brutal, and hard to look away from. It seems to challenge all the assumptions that the rest of the book was built on, but what it really challenged was all the assumptions made by Our Hero, destroying his belief in his mission, his values and his whole view of history. He was raised to view history either as Romantic (shaped by the actions of individuals) or Deterministic (progressing along an inevitable path, shaped by socio-economic forces). This is pretty much how I was raised as well. By the end of the book, Ben Elton has made me see that either view of history is self-serving, creating a comfortable narrative that gives me a context I can live with. So going back in time to change the narrative is fundamentally pointless. The real point of history is that is was somebody's present and they had to deal with whatever that present threw at them.

I recommend this book as a fascinating but uncomfortable read. Which, thinking about it, I could use as a description of almost all of Ben Elton's books. show less

This is pretty bad. It’s supposed to be a satirical thriller of sorts. We have a film director, Bruce, who makes glossy amoral flicks in which a lot of people are glamorously killed. These films provoke a lot of moral outrage and anxiety about copycat crimes. He wins an Oscar for one of them. On the same night, he and his estranged family are taken hostage by two serial killers who claim inspiration from his films and want him to absolve them, live on TV, on that basis.

So far, so mid-90s: show more all this stuff was certainly in the air, and Elton clearly wants to take the piss out of it. But what, or who, exactly, does he want to take the piss out of? All the characters are types built for mockery: the vain director, the venal ex-wife, the shallow TV hosts, etc. Most of the scenes and situations are constructed so Elton can be rude about something in addition to the people: American TV programmes, awards ceremonies, Hollywood interiors, etc. Fair enough, mock the lot, but it does help for a satire to have an actual target, and it’s really not clear what it is here. American media? American films? American culture in general? I just don’t know.

It also helps if a satire is funny, and fatally, this isn’t. We get a lot of cheap, predictable shots: at the end of the novel, everyone sues each other, because, hey, America, they sue each other there. We get a lot of sneering and smirking. It’s all so tiresome.

I keep calling this a satire, rather than a comedy. That’s partly because the jacket copy call it a satire, and partly because it does seem that Elton wants to offer something like a critique of his targets, not just a send-up. You can tell this because a lot of characters are given to making windy speeches about moral responsibility, artistic freedom, and so on. This is all very well, but since Elton makes them all idiots, it’s far from clear what the critique or message is meant to be. The thought dawns after a while that Elton has no idea. He’s adopting a smug stance that suggests he does know what all these people ought to be saying, how one can square away the competing demands, but he doesn’t. It’s a totally insincere performance, raising shallow questions in the hope of seeming profound, refusing to answer them in the hope of seeming wise.

OK, so the book fails on the satirical bit. Does it at least work as a thriller? Nope. The main problem is that Elton adopts a needlessly tortuous structure, involving flashbacks, flashforwards, occasional gimmicky cuts to descriptions of film scenes, different points of view, etc. For one thing, this means that we know more or less what’s going to happen at the end of the book more or less from the beginning. How will the hostage situation end? No tension there. For another thing, it means that Elton ends up repeating the same stuff two or more times, in flashback, in the present, from different perspectives. This happens so often it must be deliberate, but it’s very tedious and kills the book’s momentum. As does Elton’s habit of occasionally switching from normal prose to a screenplay-style format at moments of drama, which slows the reading right down and drains the drama right out.

The book is also badly, lazily written at the level of word and sentence. There’s a marked inconsistency of vernacular. The book is set in the USA, and adopts a good deal of ersatz American terminology (“babes”, “sodas”), but then mixes this us with incorrigibly British words. There’s an irritating reliance on the word “indeed” to signal ironic distance from proceedings. There’s evidence that Elton either doesn’t know or doesn’t care what “prostrate” actually means. And so on and so on. I could pull dozens of examples, but I don’t have the will and nor do you.

I will mention one last thing, though: the tits. God, this novel is full of boobies, being ogled, admired and felt by the cast of slimy men. Now, naturally, all this shameful behaviour is attributed to the characters rather than the author, but there’s so much tittiness that it’s impossible not to think Elton is in close attendance, rubbing his thighs and panting slightly. Which is of course just what the critics say about the violence in Bruce’s films: it might be just a story, but you wrote it. The one true irony of the book, and the only one that Elton didn’t mean. show less

Ben Elton has a talent for seeing past the surface of things to the reality lurking beneath. In "Dead Famous" he showed us how little reality there is in Reality TV. In "Chart Throb" he exposed how the outcomes of TV talent shows are manipulated. In "Blind Faith" he shows us where we may get to if current trends in attitudes towards privacy, intellect, and the dominance of passionate opinion over factual analysis continue.

I've found previous Ben Elton books to be fun as well as insightful. show more He uses wit, humour and careful observation to make me smile at the gaps between the world as it is presented to us and the reality that he uncovers.

"Blind Faith" is not like that. "Blind Faith" is so in your face and so horribly plausible that it make "1984" and "Fahrenheit 451" feel like light-hearted romps. Watching the plot unfold made me feel as if I were rubbernecking on a car wreck: the nice part of me wanted to look away but the reptile wrapped around my hindbrain was fascinated by the reality of the disaster.

"Blind Faith" is set in a post-flood near-future London, where the people are packed together so tightly there is only room to shuffle, not enough to walk. Social media are always on in your living room. Privacy is regarded as the kind of deviant behaviour only pedo pervert would need. Cherry-popping videos are part of everyone's online bio, laws are set by mass vote, a populist, live it large church guides all decisions, reading is illegal and vaccinations are seen as a lack of faith in God.

In the midst of all this, an ordinary man, trying to do his best and being overwhelmed.

This is a memorable book but it is not a comfortable read. The text began to make me feel as hemmed in as the characters in the novel and as overwhelmed as our hero. Ben Elton offers no comfort and no solutions, just a brutal warning. show less

I'm not sure how to classify "Identity Crisis". It feels like a satire except that it's unflinchingly honest and that kind of honesty makes me wince rather than smile. It's not a polemic as it's not selling a solution, just displaying a problem by flaying the surface of it and exposing the bloody mess underneath. It has too much bitter humour in it to be a dirge or a lament. Perhaps it is just a mirror, held up to make us look at ourselves and take in what we've become.

The focus is on how show more social media is being used to create a climate of fury, to discredit evidence-based argument and to undermine support for any view of the world that is neither angry nor extreme.

It is a world in which appearance is more important than substance, where being "on the right side of history" is achieved by weaponising hashtags to pillory opponents, where identity is more important than information, where the "national conversation" is a curated stream of propaganda that sustains anger and division to pre-empt challenges to extreme political positions.

The story is pitched around a referendum to make England independent of the rest of the UK. It's told with a bitter wit that was so close to home that I felt like I was watching a vivisection. Although it's not a long book, I had to take regular breaks from it to allow the feelings of disgust and despair to dissipate.

Ben Elton has a deep understanding of how social media is being used to shift opinion, create and sustain tribalism and distract us from the real agenda being driven by the powerful.

The strongest parts of the book are those that deal with the referendum, with mainstream media and social media response to sexual abuse and with the use of a revamped version of "Love Island" to surface issues related to gender and sexuality.

In the end, I felt the novel went nowhere. It was an exposition rather than a narrative. If these issues are new to you, it will make you think. If these issues are known to you then it may confirm your darkest views of what's happening.

I listened to the audiobook version of "Identity Crisis", which is narrated by Ben Elton. He does a serviceable job but I would have preferred to have had a narrator with a little more range. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample.
https://soundcloud.com/audiolibrary-a/identity-crisis-by-ben-elton-audiobook-exc... show less