Meltdown by Ben Elton
As he often seems to do so well Elton has pulled off the trick of catching the zeitgeist with this tale of greed, hubris and amorality.
Centred around a group of six university housemates known as the radish club, Meltdown deals with their respective and intertwining lives as they forge post-university careers in New Labour politics, banking, city trading, architecture and lifestyle consumerism.
The story follows them as the good times roll and leads inevitably to the period we now find ourselves in of financial meltdown, credit crunch, sub-prime lending, MP's expenses, 2nd home flipping, Bernard Madoff and insider trading.
What Elton does well in this story is to make the characters responsive to the times they are living in. This allows for an understanding and empathy with each one of them as we recognise their failings and foibles as being very human and very contemporary. Self-righteous discussions on schooling, wealth creation, the commodification of everything from homes to art to wine and even gilt edged tickets to the Live 8 gig help the reader to place these people in a Cool Britannia to Northern Rock bail out time frame.
The book is well paced and deeply satirical but with a message that despite the blind greed that may have appeared to be the norm prior to the financial crash there are those who can become better people out of it. A case in point being Jimmy and Monica having to withdraw their son from a private school and panicking over the thought of him getting knifed and dealing in crack as they prepare to take him to the least favoured state primary in the borough. As Jimmy says to Monica, they both attended state schools and fared OK.
I did, however, find the discussions on childcare, nannies and private versus state education rather too similar to the conversations of John O'Farrel's characters in his book 'May Contain Nuts'. Moreover Jimmy and Monica's way of dealing with their straitened circumstances was sometimes a little too good to be true and though it made for them as sympathetic characters I couldn't help feeling that Ben Elton was a little too generous to them.
The other main characters in the book, the radish club members and their respective spouses, move this story on without ever becoming superfluous to it and help bring this modern day contemporary morality tale to a believable conclusion.
Reviewed by Robert Hill
Tuesday 24 August 2010
Sunday 8 August 2010
Eye Of The Red Tsar by Sam Eastland
Eye Of The Red Tsar by Sam Eastland
Reviewed by Robert Hill
'He was condemned to the gulag, now Stalin needs him back.'
This strap line from the front cover of this book should have been a warning of how dire the experience of reading this was going to be.
Essentially this story revolves around a former Tsarist agent Pekkala, once so close to the Romanovs and the only man Nicholas II could really trust, and the murder of the Romanovs in Ekatierinburg in 1917.
Captured and tortured by the Bolsheviks and unable to tell them the whereabouts of the Romanov fortune he is sent to a Siberian gulag and left to rot. However, our hero, known by his super scary spy name 'The Emerald Eye' is made of sterner stuff and manages to survive his torture and captivity.
Found, 13 years later, by a young political commissar Kirov, 'the Emerald Eye' is summoned from the gulag with the offer of total freedom if he cooperates in the investigation of the murder of the royal family, an investigation ordered by Stalin himself. A Stalin that Pekkala was tortured and interrogated by on his original capture.
Added to this mix is Pekkala's brother Anton, a former Cheka agent who had been a guard on the house where the Romanovs were executed and who, surprise, surprise, has unresolved family issues with Pekkala.
Without having a thesaurus to hand it is hard for me to come up with all the synonyms that exist for the adjective 'contrived' but however many that exist can be applied to this poorly written and predictable story.
Told in the present and in flashback in alternate chapters a change in graphology is used to present the action occuring from the past. Presumably this change being just one of many literary devices employed to further insult the intelligence of the reader just in case the change to the past tense isn't enough to show us where we are.
Pekkala seems to make a marvellous physical and psychological recovery from the horrors endured in his incarceration with a shave being the only therapy he requires to shake off the years of isolation, 40 degree summers, minus 40 degree winters, inadequate food, no dentistry or medical help and hard physical labour.
Eastland does allude to the psychological adjustment of a return from the gulag when Pekkalla eats a proper meal for the first time (Kirov turns out to be a former trainee chef) and when a nun grasps his hand which is his first female contact in 13 years. Unfortunately, Eastland skips over this in order to carry on with the pace of this mass of coincidences and cliche.
A love interest is of course present in this story, Ilya, a former teacher in the Romanov court whom we meet in the italicised flashback chapters, a women from the early 1900s but who seems to have seen the film 'Show Me The Money' as she manages to paraphrase Rene Zeilwegger's famous line from that movie. Pekkala, with the intention of proposing to her, rows Ilya blindfolded to an island in the middle of a Petrograd Lake where he has set up an elaborate and romantic meal, on revealing to Ilya what he has done she utters the rather anachronistic phrase 'you had me at the creaking of the oars.'
I will leave this review with a short paragraph from the book that actually made me burst out laughing whilst sitting on a bus, an example of prose so bad that the comedian Stuart Lee would have the same field day with it as he had when he deconstructed the paucity of quality of Dan Brown's prose in his (Lee's) stand-up act. This extract speaks far more eloquently than I in terms of how bad Eye Of The Tsar really is.
'The child waved back, then giggled and ran behind the house. In that moment some half-formed menace spread like wings behind his eyes, as if that child was not really a child. As if something were trying to warn him in a language empty of words.'
Robert Hill
'
Reviewed by Robert Hill
'He was condemned to the gulag, now Stalin needs him back.'
This strap line from the front cover of this book should have been a warning of how dire the experience of reading this was going to be.
Essentially this story revolves around a former Tsarist agent Pekkala, once so close to the Romanovs and the only man Nicholas II could really trust, and the murder of the Romanovs in Ekatierinburg in 1917.
Captured and tortured by the Bolsheviks and unable to tell them the whereabouts of the Romanov fortune he is sent to a Siberian gulag and left to rot. However, our hero, known by his super scary spy name 'The Emerald Eye' is made of sterner stuff and manages to survive his torture and captivity.
Found, 13 years later, by a young political commissar Kirov, 'the Emerald Eye' is summoned from the gulag with the offer of total freedom if he cooperates in the investigation of the murder of the royal family, an investigation ordered by Stalin himself. A Stalin that Pekkala was tortured and interrogated by on his original capture.
Added to this mix is Pekkala's brother Anton, a former Cheka agent who had been a guard on the house where the Romanovs were executed and who, surprise, surprise, has unresolved family issues with Pekkala.
Without having a thesaurus to hand it is hard for me to come up with all the synonyms that exist for the adjective 'contrived' but however many that exist can be applied to this poorly written and predictable story.
Told in the present and in flashback in alternate chapters a change in graphology is used to present the action occuring from the past. Presumably this change being just one of many literary devices employed to further insult the intelligence of the reader just in case the change to the past tense isn't enough to show us where we are.
Pekkala seems to make a marvellous physical and psychological recovery from the horrors endured in his incarceration with a shave being the only therapy he requires to shake off the years of isolation, 40 degree summers, minus 40 degree winters, inadequate food, no dentistry or medical help and hard physical labour.
Eastland does allude to the psychological adjustment of a return from the gulag when Pekkalla eats a proper meal for the first time (Kirov turns out to be a former trainee chef) and when a nun grasps his hand which is his first female contact in 13 years. Unfortunately, Eastland skips over this in order to carry on with the pace of this mass of coincidences and cliche.
A love interest is of course present in this story, Ilya, a former teacher in the Romanov court whom we meet in the italicised flashback chapters, a women from the early 1900s but who seems to have seen the film 'Show Me The Money' as she manages to paraphrase Rene Zeilwegger's famous line from that movie. Pekkala, with the intention of proposing to her, rows Ilya blindfolded to an island in the middle of a Petrograd Lake where he has set up an elaborate and romantic meal, on revealing to Ilya what he has done she utters the rather anachronistic phrase 'you had me at the creaking of the oars.'
I will leave this review with a short paragraph from the book that actually made me burst out laughing whilst sitting on a bus, an example of prose so bad that the comedian Stuart Lee would have the same field day with it as he had when he deconstructed the paucity of quality of Dan Brown's prose in his (Lee's) stand-up act. This extract speaks far more eloquently than I in terms of how bad Eye Of The Tsar really is.
'The child waved back, then giggled and ran behind the house. In that moment some half-formed menace spread like wings behind his eyes, as if that child was not really a child. As if something were trying to warn him in a language empty of words.'
Robert Hill
'
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