Identity Crisis

Product Information

It's the sort of book you'd like everyone to read - we all contribute to the stirring of the pot, we all judge quickly and follow trends blindly. I listened to this as an audiobook read by the author, and laughed aloud more than once walking along. That is not to say that I didn’t frequently laugh out loud because it was mostly funny, but I would classify it more in the mystery genre, rather than humor.

I would be the first to admit that there are people and spaces online where it's impossible to walk without offending *someone* and that there is definitely a culture of outrage in some online spaces as well. Ben has, in his own inimitable way, brought these issues to light - all, of course, highly exaggerated but written with such brilliant humour and intelligence! So they decide to ramp up the tension by turning the non-straight non-binary nons- against the heterosexual white couple. It makes the, what to me is a, very valid point that you see all this outrage online and yet never meet anyone in the street that has this same level of vitriol about the subject. Expressions like ‘toxic’ and ‘on the wrong side of history’ crop up a lot in the first half of the book, and really cement the idea that we’re reading a contemporary satire.

This has left me to wonder, and quite frankly, worry for my younger kids who will soon be introduced to this world of culture wars and social media (with their dysfunction, manufactured and manipulated outrage, etc.

The penultimate chapter, in contrast, was sinister and menacingly threatening; ending it there would have been perfect. We have a camera trained on each of the culture-war things that are contributing to the England Out (Leave) campaign: trans people and TERFs, Love Island, Cambridge Analytica, various MeToo-type stuff, the incel guy, different campaigns over different murdered people, scenes in the police station, a lot of Twitter. A single blow to the back of the head kills a young woman, no evidence of robbery, no evidence of assault beyond the death blow, no evidence period.The problem is, I just can't work out quite what it's trying to satirise, and therefore if I think the satirisation of that issue is something I can or cannot get behind. Honestly, I think he is right on the money and that we are already here, meshed in this web of lies, lies that are told to us because we will believe them so readily as they tap in to our innermost ideals - ideals we are maybe embarrassed about admitting in day to day life but the internet knows us, it allows us to express them and if Bot A agrees with us then we are validated. This book is primarily about Inspector Mike Matlock and his team investigating the murder of Sammy, a transgender woman who was killed in a park in London. Even if you are not big on mystery/suspense or humor, I believe it is an essential read for everyone in this day and age. The racing wasn’t necessarily a reflection of pleasure so much as a) wanting to finish it so I could pick up my next book and b) not quitting so I could confirm my suspicions about whodunnit were right.

More recently he has had successes with three hit West End musicals, including the global phenomenon We Will Rock You. He has received accolades for his hit TV sit-coms, The Young Ones, Blackadder and The Thin Blue Line. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.The world has changed around him and he simply hasn't kept up with it which plunges him like a tragic hero from one awkward situation to another. He wanted to be a stagehand at the local theatre, but instead did A-Level Theatre Studies and studied drama at Manchester University in 1977. Overall: I really enjoyed it, but I think if you've never read Ben Elton you'd be better off reading one of his older satire novels to get a taste before trying this one. Lots of people died but I didn’t really care about most of them because they were just stereotypes, and I know that was part of the discussion about identities, but if I only wanted satire and commentary, I wouldn’t read a novel. I don't think there are too many groups who Ben has missed out on insulting/praising here, depending on which particular fence you're sitting on today.

A series of apparently random murders draws amiable, old-school Detective Mick Matlock into a world of sex, politics, reality TV and a bewildering kaleidoscope of opposing identity groups. I would have liked more of a focus to the story, which only really got going in the last 1/4 of the book. We see Bunter Jolly (Boris Johnson), Guppy Toad (Michael Gove) and Greased-Hogg (Jacob Rees-Mogg) as unwitting playthings of Putin, working to further their own power and accidentally increasing Putin’s stranglehold at the same time. Few authors do satire as well as Ben Elton and this seems to be his vent on everything that is absurd and simply wrong in our modern social media, PC correct world. Even more so when Matlock very publicly struggles to get his middle-aged head around the notion of Sammy’s chosen pronouns.

I would like to preface this review by saying that generally speaking I like Ben Elton and I understand that this book is satire. It all seems to be lumped in together as "PC bullshit" and "identity politics taken too far" and I just . We have an older detective struggling to keep up with the various genders and identities and ‘hash tags’ which have crept up on him and hit him from behind; we have a young woman, attracted to power and money, caught in a desperate love affair with a man serving as a proxy for the Russian government, as he attempts to undermine an ‘England Out’ referendum; bloody Love Island is never far from the goings-on of the story; and an old down-and-out actor who finds himself at the forefront of a revisionist movement to criminalise sex offenders from history, particularly focusing on Samuel Pepys.