High Society

I’ve just finished Ben Elton’s High Society. It’s not about the social elite, it’s about – as Peter Paget, its central character says ‘a society in which people who are otherwise law-abiding criminalise themselves by buying and taking drugs’. Otherwise? Aren’t burglars law-abiding other than their tendency to break into people’s houses and take away things which don’t belong to them?

Once I’d started High Society, I asked the Ultimate Frisbee Freak (who’s almost 18 and therefore about to be allowed to vote for people who make this kind of decision) what he thought of the potential legalization of all illegal drugs. He thought it’d be stupid. Not only because there would be mass addiction amongst the young (‘Have you seen town on a Friday and Saturday night? And that’s just alcohol!) but also because he thinks it is naïve to assume that all the gangsters currently engaged in drug smuggling would just go away and take up crochet or working in call centres. They would, in his view, just find some other illegal and equally socially unpleasant way to earn a ton of money.

And he’s probably right. High Society portrays some very nasty criminals indeed. Pimps mostly, preying on illegal immigrants and homeless girls, who feed the young women drugs to keep them docile and – if not high - at least not entirely connected to the awful things that are happening to them and proceed to live off their immoral earnings. And the book leaves you in no doubt just how immoral these earnings are. (One of the things I consistently like about Ben Elton's books is that he can show you the seamiest side of life without ever losing his grip on your attention or allowing you to think that this is all just so grim that you don't want to read any more. His people and his plots are so engaging that however nitty the gritty gets you're always carried along.)

Interestingly, given that this is the group Ben Elton himself could be said to belong to, the book also shows the devastating effects drugs can have on those who are less socially deprived but just as addicted. Rich addicts in the book lose their sense of identity every bit as much as the drug-doped prostitutes, they just do it whilst wearing nice clothes and drinking champagne to wash down the shopping-trolleys’ worth of cocaine, ecstasy, crystal meth etc which they sniff, swallow and otherwise shovel into their protesting systems.

The moral heart of the book is Jessie, a Scottish teenager who becomes homeless after being abused by her stepfather and subsequently falls prey to the pimps. Her aspiration, expressed very vividly, is a room of her own whose door she can shut and within which her privacy – not to mention her body – will remain inviolate.

It echoes Virginia Woolf’s plea for a room of one’s own, though possibly for rather different reasons.

This extremely modest aspiration of Jessie's throws a spotlight on to the self-indulgent wastefulness of the lives lived by the book's smart set . They have so much more than a room of their own, but they don't know how to value it. They take drugs because they’re bored, because they’re aimless and because they can afford to. None of those things, the book makes it very clear, would change if it were made legal.

So, does Ben Elton come down on the side of legalisation or not? Well, all the most persuasive speeches in the book are in favour of it – in fact I can’t think of anybody actually speakng against- but a horrified little voice which comes from between the lines says ‘Are you mad? Look what drugs do to people!’ Text, as one of my lecturers from the old days would have said, and subtext.

I think, once his exams are over next summer and he’s a free man, I’m going to persuade the UFF to read High Society so he and I can argue some more about the drugs thing. Because whilst, as a police officer in the book says, we are obviously losing the war on drugs, I’m not sure I want to contemplate what making peace with them would look like.

I remember being very disturbed indeed, when I was the UFF’s age, by people’s willing consumption of soma in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World; a whole society willingly complicit in its own oppression.

Legalising drugs and allowing the government to make shedloads of money out of taxing their sale seems to me to be teetering dangerously on the brink of a state-sponsored nation of doped-up junkies. Brave New Britain…

Whose Point of View?

Today, in a rainy, windy Canterbury, I’ve been working on a really crucial scene in my new book. It’s one of those scenes that a book absolutely turns on. But, despite the fact that I’ve known it was coming since I started the book, it’s been excruciating to try and get into. Industrial quantities of tea has been consumed, much creative thinking has been done whilst ironing shirts has been (does anybody else think about their writing whilst ironing – seems to free something up in me…) and many false starts have fallen to the delete button.

Why all this angst? Because I’ve had to decide whose point of view it’s going to be told in. As I think I’ve mentioned here before, the new book has three narrators. As each has a very different voice and outlook on the unfolding story, the decision as to who gets to tell this central scene is really important. Because they share the same story but their take on it is very different.

The book I’m reading at the moment – Ben Elton’s High Society – also has many narrators, but they’re all telling their own interweaving stories. Not sure whether that’s easier or more difficult but it looks easier from where I’m sitting.

High Society is about the legalisation of drugs. I’m fascinated by the way Ben Elton approaches the idea through the personal stories of an MP throwing the hat of his career into the legalisation-ring, a drug-addicted teenage prostitute with a history of abuse, a pop-star with all the substance abuses of a Pete Doherty and a policeman with a family to protect. I haven’t worked out yet where Elton stands on the subject of drug legalisation (just as it was difficult to work out his stance on film violence in Popcorn) as all his characters speak with such conviction from their various standpoints, but I’ll be interested to see how he navigates towards the end of the book and who tells which bits!

Ben Elton and WW1 lit

Yesterday, at book group, the question was inevitbly asked – have you read Birdsong? Everyone had but me.
It’s the whole First World War thing – I’ve found it all horribly emotional ever since I became a bit obsessed with Wilfred Owen in my mid-teens.
Now, I can’t bear to go near literature about the Great War. I feel as if I did all my outraged grieving for it in my adolescence and I don’t really want to go back.

And yet…
I read Ben Elton’s book set in the 1914-1918 horror, The First Casualty and enjoyed it very much. Admired it and liked it, even. I remember being struck by the way he managed to convey the horrors (and it felt as if he’d really done his research in this one, from the pips on the generals’ shoulders to the privates’ conerns as to where their next decent opportunity for a crap was going to occur) in a way which managed to leave you at one remove from the action and didn’t twist your guts or your heartstrings.
Maybe it’s because The First Casualty is more a detective story than a first world war story and the central character – a conscientious objector - ends up in France almost by accident. Truth, as I’m sure everybody out there knows, is supposed to be the first casualty of war. In Elton’s book, the truth is that somebody has used the carnage of war to kill somebody on their own side. Except, clearly, not quite on their side enough.

Some people (clearly not the millions who make him a best seller) are very sniffy about Ben Elton’s books. As if, just because he had a successful career as a stand-up comedian and actor, he couldn’t possibly be a good novelist as well.
But why not? It’s all writing, all communication with the audience and I would imagine that you learn pretty quickly how to pitch your material to your audience when you’re standing in front of a couple of hundred drunken students, or belligerent men in northern working men’s clubs. No point being precious and sticking to your clever modish, avant-garde material in those circumstances. The sort of death you’d die, theatrically speaking, would be one you couldn’t possibly resurrect a career from.

What Ben Elton is good at, it seems to me, is understanding how people see certain kinds of situation - the First World War (The First Casualty), being infertile (Inconceivable), being stalked (Blast from the Past) – and portraying it in a way which subverts all the emotional assumptions we make about it. Inconceivable, for instance, far from being a heart-breaking misery memoir of infertility is hilarious and made a great film, without ever betraying its subject.

Reading Human Traces which has its very own little slice of WW1, and being challenged about Birdsong, made me wonder whether I should overcome my adolescent hang-overs and have a little foray into First World War lit.
But refreshing my memory on The First Casualty and realising how much of the Elton oeuvre I have yet to read, looks set to send me on a much more fun journey. With my birthday coming up and the inevitable book tokens, I think there may be a run on Monsieur Elton in my local Waterstone’s.