Stark

I think I laughed more reading this book than I have during live stand-up comedy. And I laugh a lot during stand-up. For some reason the description of the tree in the middle of the Australian desert 'dying' when there was a lack of water and then 'blossoming' when its deep root system finally tapped into the water table - and no one above ground being able to tell the difference - was the most hilarious thing I've ever read. In a way that is so good that you can't possibly explain it to others in a way they'll understand so I'll stop now.

A serious topic with such an underpinning of such gorgeous well-observed perfectly-balanced comedy that you can go in one end a suited conservative and emerge out the other a moccasin-wearing hippy show more without even noticing your internal progression. Almost made me want to vote green.

Brilliant.

Memorable.

Read it.

(twice) show less

I read this in the summer of 1989 not long after it first came out, and it stayed with me. I was reminded of the book by seeing all these billionaires on space missions — in the case of Jeff Bezos, founded by exploiting his employees. I liked the characters — others have described them as not very well written but that’s not really the point. The point is that here we are on an increasingly warming Earth, with 300 forest fires burning in British Columbia, fires that you can see from space, and numerous floods in Europe, China, and elsewhere, and billionaires are jetting off to space.

A cast of varied characters and Ben Elton pokes fun at their quirks and foibles, rich and poor alike. In fact, he could be Australian for his ability to take the mickey out of people. A far-fetched tale of conspiracy amongst billionaires planning on escaping Earth in its death throes to establish a colony on the moon.
The shortsightedness of the plan is breathtaking as is its scope. The ludicrousness of it is balanced by embedded grains of truth. It's ridiculous, yet it is serious.
As always, I'm impressed by Ben Elton's ability to provide pithy social comment in a coat of fiction.

The weather has always been a source of endless conversation but now the mantra had changed. The song did not remain the same? Whereas previously the comment had always been along the lines of 'bloody awful weather . . .'
Now people constantly moaned that it was 'funny' weather; it was not like it had been when they were young; it was no longer 'proper' weather.. The strange thing was that even teenagers spoke in this manner.

Stark is a satire about billionaire businessmen, eco-warriors and the end of the world. It is set about 10 years after it was written and it's still relevant today, with the world failing to face up to global warming, pollution of the food chain and ships full of toxic waste sailing the oceans but never allowed to show more land and unload their deadly cargoes. The billionaires knew exactly how much trouble the world was in, and had hoped that somehow market forces might force them to do something about it, but as that never happened they just stood back and let it play out, while the hippies and journalists were unable to prevent the slide into disaster as they just weren't as ruthless and well-organised as their opponents.

'Listen, man,' Walter would say, 'like, one day you're freeing Beagles, the next you're riding the bus all night defending old ladies . . . I mean, cool, don't get me wrong, very cool. I just feel, like, we should, like . . . you know, formalize our avenues of protest, right. . .? Or does that sound a bit too much like heavy fascist mind control, and, like, pretty soon we'll be as bad as the people we're protesting against?'
'Well, it does a bit, man,' Zimmerman would reply.

This is Ben Elton's first novel and I first read it in 1989 or 1990 soon after it came out in paperback. I remember enjoying it a lot although I didn't remember much except what the title referred to and the location of the Stark Conspiracy's construction site and I have read a lot of his other novels since then and also saw Popcorn when the play was put on at Nottingham Playhouse. On re-reading it, I think his later novels are better, but there are moments of drama that come as a big shock between the laughs, and Stark introduced me to one of my favourite novelists, so it is definitely worthy of 4 stars. show less

If you've read or watched anything by Ben Elton, you're familiar with his style of comedy. Quick-witted, razor-sharp and always committed to the kind of social, political or economical commentary that leaves certain people slightly embarassed. The kind of people who deserve to be slightly embarassed. Anyway, he's refined his comedy over the years to go from scathing to insidiously funny while still hitting all the right notes. Stark was written almost 20 years ago and it shows. It's Ben Elton, and the writing is witty and flows well, but the commentary is heavy-handed and more than once takes a little de-tour from the narrative to drive a few points home about those god-awful capitalist pigs ruining the planet one spraycan at a time. show more That doesn't mean it's not a good book. It's an excellent book and you should read it to gain that extra step to enlightenment, but you might sigh once in a while and think to yourself: couldn't he have saved that for a major leaflet campaign? show less

Ben Elton wrote some of the funniest television ever committed to video tape (think, for example, "Blackadder" and "The Young Ones") so I was looking forward to "Stark", his first foray into the novel form. Quite satirical in places and laughs, or at least smiles, throughout, "Stark" is worth a read although I couldn't help but be slightly disappointed once I put down the book. Later Elton books reinforced this disappointment, but I guess that's a story for another time.

Not as polished as Ben Elton's more recent novels, more raw somehow, but just as funny and quirky. What makes this one stand out for me is that the storyline, no matter how far fetched, really is the current state of the world taken to its logical conclusion. I think of it every time there's a news item about big business interests killing the planet.