Ben Elton's high times

I'm sure you remember Ben Elton in his stand-up comedian heyday. He was brash, pop-political, torrential in delivery, frequently irritating, occasionally funny, and always attired in a suit that was uniquely a provocation both to the well-dressed and the badly-dressed. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that he brings the same qualities to his works of fiction: this is a stand-up routine between hard covers. And with its depiction of opium poppies, line of coke and ecstasy tablet, which offends both those who take drugs and those who don't, the jacket does the same job the suit used to do.

The flaws in Elton's routine are easy to enumerate. His characters come as a deep-frozen job-lot from the fiction supermarket, simply requiring to be thawed out before being set in motion. Let me introduce you, for example, to Peter Paget the backbench MP consumed with a reforming zeal in the house, while cavorting like a performing seal in his parliamentary assistant's bedroom. And here's the young pop star Tommy Hanson, trying to bury his teenybop origins under a vast weight of drugs, sexual shenanigans and ludicrous worldweariness. The main characters are backed up by a noisy and colourful gallery of evil French pimps, dignified rastas, nympho posh birds, bent coppers, slimy journalists and prostitutes with hearts of gold.

Having assembled this group of old friends, Elton proceeds to make them more familiar still by having them spout cliches galore, talk in the language of the street, and generally give the English language the good old kicking it undoubtedly deserves for being so stuck-up.

As a special treat, the author goes the extra mile by rendering phonetically the various accents of his characters. A particular favourite of mine was the Birmingham girl locked up in a Bangkok jail for drug trafficking. As she waited to see what sentence was going to be passed on her, I found myself vociferously in the pro death-penalty camp.

All this said, High Society is a joy to read. Having seemingly hobbled himself, Elton proceeds to build up a startling head of narrative steam. The story is told from the point of view of the various protagonists in short, sharp bursts, and the simple plot lines intertwine to form a most satisfying whole. One-liners constantly whizz about, some funny, some pertinent, some both, plenty neither.

Elton's main strength, however, is that he is a good old-fashioned moralist. He will forgive his characters anything except hypocrisy, cruelty and mean-mindedness. His good guys and girls may soil themselves most foully, but they will be redeemed. The smarmy, the malicious and the two-faced face a future mapped out by a pen dipped in venom.

There is still genuine pleasure to be had in watching an author striving to put the world to rights. Oi, Ben, I'm right, innit?