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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
SATIRE SLAPSTICK AND DOOMSDAY, 14 Jul 2005
Ben Elton is probably best known as scriptwriter for the Blackadder series, and that will give you a fair idea of both his talent and his way of thinking. To get the most out of Stark it probably helps to have followed the stand-up comic series he used to do on the BBC. That was brilliant and no two ways about it, provided you didn't find some of the topics embarrassing, which, in the absence of any maiden aunts, I didn't. No topic was off-limits. There was a great deal about certain parts of the body, but we were long used to that from Billy Connolly. Where Ben Elton went further was in dealing with political and racial, and particularly with environmental, issues. He used to deliver his monologues at machine-gun speed, and I was impressed not only by the sheer physical stamina he must have needed but also by what was either a phenomenal memory or a genius for on-the-spot improvisation, or maybe both. He went in for gag-lines in a way Billy Connolly doesn't, but one talent they have in common is for seeing the ridiculous side of quite ordinary things. There was always a general theme each time, environmental as often as not, but a few dozen incidental targets also used to get shot at along the way.Read Stark with that in mind. I like the potshot he takes at champagne - the name trademarked so as to keep the price artificially high. However I remembered with pleasure the way we the public called the champagne producers' bluff at the millennium by boycotting the stuff so that we could find some high-quality surplus being sold off at bargain prices quite some time later. This thought brought me some comfort in reading Stark - perhaps we are not totally in the hands of the tycoons. Other details were entirely incidental and unrelated to the general message of the book, but he is the first person I have ever known to call attention to a strange deaths-head kind of face that has long repelled me in some famous American women anxious to preserve their looks beyond a certain age. The thread of the book is serious in more senses than one. It is about the threat to the environment, and just exactly how bad that is I don't think anyone is quite sure. Ben Elton goes completely over the top, and that was smart. I don't suppose that even he takes at face value his scenario of the asset-stripper co-opted into the exclusive club of monstrous tycoons - a tobacco-baron, an arms exporter, a fast-food king foisting his stringburgers and gristlefurters on a complaisant public and other usual suspects - whose purpose is literally to bring about environmental disaster in the full knowledge of what they are doing. By caricaturing the suspects in this way he avoids being overtly political, and by going to extremes in his disaster-scenario he keeps the story vivid and involving, but just a story (I hope) all the same. For good measure he throws in a couple of unrelated nuclear catastrophes and the wreck of a maritime cargo of toxic waste. Such is the power of the money involved that people manage to stay unaware of what is going on (governments hardly get a mention), and the only resistance comes from a picaresque assortment of well-meaning liberals, hippies, dropouts and aborigines. One of these is a devotee of Judge Dread comics, and I wonder whether Ben got some of his ideas from such sources himself. The story moves fast and the characters are interesting, although the book would hardly challenge Evelyn Waugh or Julian Barnes for Fine Writing. I found it helped to keep in mind my image of Ben Elton on stage, and I could hear his voice quite clearly - he writes much of it the way he talks. I find it hard to blame the politicians or even the tycoons in real life beyond a certain extent. If we are being suckered that is mainly our own fault, it seems to me, and we are, it seems to me, and it is, it seems to me. The planet's resources are not a bottomless pit, it will not take more than a certain amount of abuse just as our own bodies will not, we have not yet seen certain disasters as they could be (e.g. a nuclear meltdown, of which Chernobyl was a mere mooncast shadow), and of course mother nature herself could take a hand with, say, meteor-strikes, earthquakes, super-volcanoes etc. Probably nobody quite knows the extent of the chances we're taking, but it seems to me that we need to wake up and to grow up in the way we're behaving. We were given our brains to use, and we should remember the parable of the talents.
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