We all know someone... (High Society - Ben Elton)

Name: drewboy

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Product:	High Society - Ben Elton
Date:	01.11.04 (666 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Characters, Layout, Dialects

Disadvantages: Touchy subject, Dialects!

The war on drugs. This issue is one that is never really going to be solved for a very long time and it’s fair to say that there really is only one ‘PC’ stance in the eyes of the British Public at the moment and that is to keep fighting the drug lords and punishing the users to the full extent of the law.

Enter five stereotypical characters from across the nation who are placed to show how drug use (or misuse) is a central part of life in the UK at the moment.

First we are introduced to Tommy Hanson. The darling of the UK music scene tells his story from the chair in an AA meeting and goes from his humble beginnings winning a ‘Pop Stars’ like TV show through to his high profile Concerts and appearances at the Brits telling tales of drugs, sex and of course rock and roll. We follow the recent course of his life learning about the ups and downs of celebrity and how his alcoholism and drug use landed him in the meetings he attends.

Next we have Peter Paget, an ambitious Labour back bencher, happily married with two kids in an upmarket area of the country. Paget has a radical stance on the war against drugs where he wants to legalise the whole lot but has no luck getting any backing in this until he is given the opportunity to introduce a private members bill to parliament. He takes this as the chance to put his point across however the day it is announced two children die from accidentally swallowing ecstasy tablets and he has to defend himself to the hilt. He does get the support of someone very high up in the Police force and events happen that turns his private members bill into front page news and he gradually gets the support of the nation.

Jessie is a young runaway girl from Glasgow and we first meet her fresh of the bus in London. We follow her story as she is dragged into the world of prostitution after being given the chance to ‘just try’ some heroin. She starts off as a pimps whore however after trying to escape her hell we see her ending up in much worse circumstances, battling with some seriously dodgy people as well as her full time drug addiction.

A Brummie girl called Sonia is introduced to us from the Hilton Hotel in Bangkok as she enjoys a free holiday organised in return for the use of her gut to transport a large quantity of heroin to her home country. She is at first very proud of the entrepreneur in her until pf course she ends up in a Thai jail on drug smuggling charges. We follow her experience with in the jail and her contact with the British Ambassador and just how powerless they are to help a person in this predicament.

After Peter Paget names the Police support he has, we are taken to the home of Commander Barry Leman where his wife receives a threatening phone call from an mystery caller who demands that Leman withdraws his support for the Paget bill or there would be dire circumstances. As the caller knows the identity of his daughter and where she goes to school his wife is understandably upset by this call. Leman thinks he knows who this is however and believes it is just idle threats however circumstances take an unexpected turn and his support in Paget is tested to its limits.


I very much enjoyed this book. I found the layout of the story to keep me very much intrigued by what would happen next. There are no chapters as such, the story moves to different locations and this sometimes happens after many pages or just a couple of paragraphs. I enjoyed how Elton linked each character to each other at certain points and how we saw each situation through the different eyes of the characters in question.

The characters themselves while very believable, were obviously based on certain characters in real life, and at times it was a bit difficult to actually concentrate on Tommy Hanson for example, and not think “that is SO Robbie Williams”. While I do believe it was a good idea to have each character ‘speak’ in their own accents, I found this a bit hard to get used to at first – even the Glasweigen Jessie to which I have a lot of experience in trying to understand – however it does allow Elton to utilise local colloquialisms to great effect when characters are describing their experiences.

I think the only character I could properly sympathise with was the Jessie character as I felt that her situation was a lot more genuine and not in any way her fault whereas the others had things to answer for in their choices through the storyline.

I very much agree with the subject matter in the book and feel that Elton did a very admiral job in getting across this viewpoint and would hope that this book will, while fiction, open up the minds of quite a few people that the war on drugs was lost years ago and it is time to look at other options to try and make the country a safer and better place to live. His choice of characterisation did very well in highlighting that it is more than likely people will know at least one person who is in some capacity, a drug user.

I have never read any other Ben Elton books but I felt that his use of political issues worked extremely well and I am currently on the look out for another of his books. He really does make a very good case for the legalisation of all drugs however I was an easy audience for that. I am not sure how someone who is of a different viewpoint would react to the very radical viewpoint however I think that as long as this book is approached with an open mind, I would think that almost anyone would find at least something about the book interesting, if not to exactly agree with it.

I have decided to give it four stars here because I did find it very enjoyable, it did make me turn each page with vigour, however I feel that there will be some people who will take great offence at the subject matter and some may find the regional dialects difficult to read.

The book is available from amazon.co.uk at £5.59 which I think is a fair price.

Thanks for reading and take care people!

drew

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