Meltdown by Ben Elton

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