I’m
not suggesting that Elton is an Orwell – he’s not. But there’s enough in his
latest satire of contemporary life to make the reader’s laughter a touch
nervous. (Review by Margaret von Klemperer, courtesy of The Witness)
Ben Elton has done so much as a performer,
playwright, novelist and writer for TV (we can forgive him almost anything for
giving us Blackadder) that his status
is probably assured. But his output has been uneven, so I wasn’t sure what to
expect from Identity Crisis. However,
there is a lot to like.
The action, set in a not-too-distant post
Brexit future, starts with the discovery of a body in a London park. The victim
is a young woman, killed by a single blow to the back of the head. The decent
old-fashioned cop, Mick Matlock, who is in charge of the investigation, gets
off on the wrong foot by saying publicly that she “was in the wrong place at
the wrong time”. That’s deemed politically incorrect, and needs a public grovel
for “misspeaking”. And to compound his problems, particularly with pronouns, at
the post mortem it is obvious that the young woman is endowed with a full set
of male genitals.
Elton is soon having fun at the expense of
gender politics, feminists of both the old and new persuasions, reality TV, the
new religion of taking offence at anything and everything and, above all,
social media and its sinister manipulation. There’s a historian, determined to
establish the proper historical role of women in armies, to the extent that she
“proves” Alfred the Great was a woman. And Samuel Pepys is headed for the sex
offenders’ register as a serial groper (which he undoubtedly was) despite the
fact that he has been dead well over 300 years. Meanwhile, the body count
rises.
The scariest part of Elton’s tale brings in
Communication Sandwich, a company which, through algorithms (I’m still not sure
I know what they are, but never mind) targets various sections of society on
social media, fuels their bigotry and anger and persuades them to take up
various positions. It’s a kind of Big Brother scenario, and no doubt, when
George Orwell published Nineteen
Eighty-Four there were readers who thought the whole thing just too
far-fetched. I’m not suggesting that Elton is an Orwell – he’s not. But there’s
enough in his latest satire of contemporary life to make the reader’s laughter
a touch nervous. - Margaret von Klemperer
Identity
Crisis is published by Bantam Press. ISBN:
9780593073582
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