The War on Drugs for Dummies (High Society - Ben Elton)

Member Name: sandrabarber

Product:	High Society - Ben Elton
Date:	20/10/03 (880 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: easy to read

Disadvantages: too easy to read

Many people knock Ben Elton these days and accuse him of ?selling out?. Indeed, Queen and Rod Stewart musicals, collaborations with Lloyd-Webber and compering the Queen?s jubilee concert are not what anyone would have foreseen in the 1980?s for the writer of the anarchic Young Ones and surprisingly filthy, politically-militant stand-up. I myself was a huge fan in the old days, but these days find him rather too tame for my tastes. That said, I?m not one of his knockers. I think he?s an immensely talented and versatile man. And at nearly 40, I understand the difference between ?selling out? and mellowing, and I?ve come to appreciate the populist just as much as the avant garde.

So when I plucked his latest novel, High Society, from the supermarket shelves I approached it with an open mind and looked forward to a rollocking good read with a bit of food-for-thought thrown in for good measure.

High Society is about the war on drugs and the fact that it is well and truly lost. Like the film and TV series Traffic, it presents drugs and their personal and societal effects from a variety of perspectives and forms a map of a world paying a huge price for the way it has allowed drugs to infiltrate all levels of the social strata and take control.

The novel centers around five different characters whose lives are ruled by drugs:

Peter Paget MP is in favour of the legalisation of all drugs. He sees that the war against them can never be won and believes that the only way to minimize the harm they do is to take them out of the hands of the violent criminals who control and peddle them.

Commander Barry Leman also believes in legalisation. Currently investigating corruption in the police drugs squad, he sees that officers working on the front line are more likely to be corrupted or defeated than they are to scrape any more than the smallest temporary victories.

Tommy Hanson, pop icon, takes drugs the way that others tak
e a cup of tea ? frequently, every day. His life is a mess and his personality changes according to his drug of choice at any given moment. But he has seen the light, and he?s attending recovery meetings.

Sonia, a young Brummie girl, accepts a thousand pounds to act as a ?drug mule?. She thinks the challenge will be exciting and worthwhile.

Jessie is a 17 year old heroin-addicted prostitute. Sexually abused in her Glasgow home, she fled to London and found herself under the ?care? of a pimp who fed her heroin and crack until she was addicted enough to go out and whore for more.

All of these people are related by drugs, and as their stories interweave their lives also come together and/or affect those of the others? in the story.

So far, so good. We?re getting the whole picture, we?re seeing how it all interweaves and forms a chain-reaction, and it?s written with a fine structural control. We?re also getting the current ?drugs debate? in a way which makes sense to us and explains without any hysteria or misconception the case for legalisation.

However, the book has many problems, and for me those problems are the characters.

Almost every character in this book is a cliché. Paget is the archetypal nice, well-suited middle-class family man who falls prey to temptation. Leman is the archetypal maverick policeman who finds himself facing corruption in his own back yard. Hanson is so clearly modeled on Robbie Williams and Liam Gallagher that you can?t divorce him from them in your mind. And Jessie is the poor victim so beloved of every cop show on TV. None of this is helped by the fact that both Hanson and Jessie are given accents so strong and stereotypical that they become caricatures.

The second big problem for me was Elton himself. He just can?t keep himself out of this book. Every so often, particularly when talking for the favour of legalisation, each of the characters will say something wit
h a phraseology untypical of themselves and completely typical of Elton. It?s not what they say that offends me (in fact I am in favour of legalisation myself), it?s just that it?s so unsubtly done that it interrupts the flow of the narrative and further suspends our disbelief in the characters.

I do applaud Elton for writing a book of this nature in a style that will appeal to the widest possible audience. I admire the way he takes such an emotive and misunderstood theme and spells it out in terms that make it seem the only sensible thing to do. But descending to cliché the way he does actually undermines the message he is trying to get across and insults the intelligence of his readers.

If you don?t know much about the drugs debate or don?t understand why an increasing body of people are calling for legalisation, this novel will explain in easy-to-read terms what it is all about. And if you can suspend your disbelief in the characters and grow to care about them, it is a page-turner.

However, my impression by the end of the book was that Elton is capable of better than this, and better than this is what the reading public deserves.

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