Murder takes farce beyond satire

Ben Elton's novel revolves around the latest example of reality television, House Arrest, the brainchild of Geraldine Hennessy, a foul-mouthed harridan with a colossal overbite and fewer morals than Genghis Khan.

Ten people (five m., five f.) are locked in a house. Thirty cameras and 40 microphones relay their activities to the outside world. Each week they vote to expel two members; the studio audience chooses which of the two is to go. At the end of the run, the surviving contestant scoops the pool.

Ratings are good, but they hit the stratosphere when, on the 27th day of incarceration, one of the girls is killed on camera and the programme, now with an unknown murderer in the group, continues.

The investigation is conducted by Inspector Stanley Spencer Coleridge, a man of old-fashioned values and integrity, and also (as his name makes amply clear) the representative of art and culture in a Philistine world.

But the crime and its detection are merely a device to hold the book together and degenerate into farce long before the end. Farce, that is, defined as the ludicrous, rather than the comic, for there is hardly a laugh in the book.

It is, rather, the expression of an almost Swiftian disgust, not only with television, but with the whole of contemporary society, although the most vicious and splenetic attacks are aimed at the generation of twenty-somethings represented by the contestants on House Arrest, with their mindless language ("wicked!", "amped up!", "fair play to"), their belief that their rights are infinitely extendable and their total lack of interest in anything that does not directly concern themselves.

Animal rights activists also get it in the neck, as do trauma therapists, Oprah Winfrey psychobabble, New Age waffle (and beliefs), astrology, a prime minister who promises at Question Time, apropos of the murder, to "listen to the people" and to "feel their pain" and a minister of culture who remarks on a late-night chat show that "history and stuff " are not "very relevant to what young people are interested in today".

Pleasingly savage though these attacks are, their effect is blunted by the fact that most of the targets are beyond satire. Dead Famous often reads more like a study of British society at the turn of the millennium than a comic novel.