Ben Elton is best known to most people as a writer of sitcoms such as Blackadder and, before that, as a stand-up. This is a pity as he’s also a writer of very good comic fiction. His latest offering, Identity Crisis, is a razor-sharp satire of post-Brexit Britain whose targets include: English nationalism, political correctness, gender and identity politics, MeToo, politicians who misspeak but subsequently own their misspeaking (‘This is not who I am’) and much else besides. It’s a world where all rape victims must be referred to as ‘survivors’ even if they’re dead (at which point they become dead survivors), a world where Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) is investigated for historic sex crimes, and a world where a retrospectively non-consensual kiss on Love Island can be considered a kind of oral rape. I found little to disagree with, and a lot to laugh at, in Elton’s gleeful skewering of these subjects. Unfortunately for him, his novels will never win a major literary prize because they’re funny and accessible, qualities that seem to be anathema to most literary prize judges.
Another novel I recently enjoyed, though with some reservations, is Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein, a terrifying and often shocking fable updating the Frankenstein story to a futuristic world of sexbots and post-human AI. Winterson pulls no punches in her dystopian vision of an AI-engineered world, a vision that may well prove as prescient in its own way as Brave New World. The novel also includes a beautifully-observed recreation of the circumstances surrounding the inspiration for, and composition of, Frankenstein – one of my all-time favourite novels – conceived when Mary Shelley was just 19 years old. Unfortunately I felt the book somewhat lost the plot, literally so, in its second half and ended with more of a whimper than a bang. Nonetheless it’s a bold and brave attempt to warn against an all-too-possible future and confirms Winterson’s status as one of the most gifted British writers at work today.
Robert Grossmith 