This Other Eden
By Ben Elton
Pocket Books, 344 pp, $13.95
Foetal Attraction
By Kathy Lette
Picador, 280 pp, $14.95
Reviewed by Dave Riley
Ben Elton, in full flight, is a gab feast. Elton, aka "motor mouth", by trade is a stand up comic, one of Britain's most successful. Those familiar with The Young Ones or Black Adder on television will recognise the Elton logo — somewhat raucous and frequently over the top — as he has co-written many episodes of these cult comedies.
If you are keen to experience him in the flesh he commences another antipodean tour late next month. But at $36 a seat — the asking price at my local venue — maybe something a little bit cheaper is what you are after.
If you must forgo the indulgence of Elton live, then his latest novel may satisfy your appetite for humour (marked down to under $15) and socially aware humour at that. It feels so much better to laugh on cue when it is politically correct to do so.
While he disowns such labelling, Ben Elton's edge nonetheless cuts with comic righteousness so that he wears his political loyalties brazenly on his sleeve — and book covers. "Living in a crime-torn, poverty-stricken, ill society", he said recently, "doesn't make your life any happier just because you are making a hundred grand a year. A feeling of community, of responsibility for others, is the only way to enjoy wealth, and I put up my hand and say I want to enjoy my wealth."
Indeed, Ben Elton as we know him is as much a product of Thatcherism as the poll tax, so that his humour is soured by a social reality he is not too keen about. Anger and laughter (and guilt too) make Ben Elton run.
This Other Eden is his third novel and, like the others, is sure to be a best seller. Into the self-absorbed and serious business of saving the planet, Elton injects both comedy and parable. This is not magic on his part because he works extremely hard to crank up a rollicking pace. Like the novelist Tom Sharpe, Elton is keen to keep the story bawdy and his characters are ruled as much by their gonads as their green passions or lack of them.
The 21st century world in this novel is a dirty one. The haves live in claustropheres — self-contained eco-shelters marketed for domestic use — while the rest of the human population make do on the increasingly polluted periphery. Herein lies the seeds of a conspiracy in which the head of the vast Claustophere Corporation manipulates the market to promote a higher and more consistent turnover. At stake is a capitalist paradise where demand chases supply and people's needs are engineered by fostering the prospect that when the planet's environment finally goes bust unless you have your own private cubby to run to, you're cactus.
Elton's vision of eco-Armageddon is not completely satisfying although he captures some of the logic of it. Trying to turn on a tale of adventure and pit the heroes in his plot against the sallied might of the transnationals doesn't ring true. This Other Eden nonetheless recycles a serviceable tale through a series of inventive twists so that the reader is dazzled by the many contrivances.
Elton is at his best when he steps out of the story to wallow in an aside or when he exploits sticky situations to make up the most outlandish solutions.
En route there is a message, one that I don't much care for. While the deteriorating environment of the 21st century may be a bleak and challenging milieu to set a comic novel, Ben Elton is quick to occupy the ecological high ground. When you are projected into the future you can view the present through hindsight, especially if the world created is one of your own imagination. Thus Elton spells out the moral of his tale which is that unless the planet is "free from the exploitative, parasitic human virus" that has infected it for so long, it cannot cleanse itself. Coming after the chuckles, such a bleak prognosis is a bummer. The way Elton calls it, humankind is now enjoying its last laughs.
While This Other Eden is a farce, peopled by overdrawn and overwrought caricatures of us lesser mortals, Elton typecasts his heroines as assertive and independent feminists — albeit "spunky" — on which you can rely. The best boys on the other hand are led into adventure by lust. And lust, love, pain and the whole darn thing is the topic of Kathy Lette's latest book, Foetal Attraction.
This is a novel that sets its pace and style in its first three sentences and doesn't let up until the end: "My female friends had told me that giving birth was like shitting a water melon. They lied. It's like excreting a block of flats ... " This third sentence continues and gets even better. Thereafter you are hooked.
Vicious word play is employed brutally in page after page as Madeline Wolfe mouths her way through one love affair and into pregnancy. Away from her Australian home and in love with Alex she falls back on all her reserves of wit to survive among the beautiful creatures of London's gliterati. While Alex may give "the best cunnilingus this side of a detachable shower nozzle", Maddy cannot manage to tie the bastard down.
Foetal Attraction is more than a record of verbal exchanges between consenting adults in private. Alex may be a good lay but, between clinches, his mandatory interest is himself. As the affair sours Maddy turns her sarcasm on him. Pregnant and abandoned, on the question of an abortion her indecision is final.
And yet this book is hilarious. Lette employs language like a barrage. The pompous intelligentsia that make up her lover's circle of friends are bitterly taunted for their hypocrisy. Left dilettantes, they are portrayed as shallow and self-serving. Even the intimate experience of pregnancy and childbirth encourages Lette to rise to the occasion — all the grunting, squatting, panting, pushing and screaming are squeezed onto the page so that in an all-too-rare outburst, a woman writer can pick over the experience of excruciating pain in a series of bitter jokes.
Unlike Ben Elton's humorous foray into the future, Lette is not interested in pontificating. At most she suggests that women should drop their quest for Mr Right and settle instead for a good orgasm. Because she is so keen to grapple with the experiences related in her novel — and do it honestly and bluntly — her tale of love gone wrong is very moving. Maddy Wolfe suffers no bull and her sharpness in saying so ensures that anger, rather than self pity, sustains her.
There is not a mawkish moment in Foetal Attraction. Romance is looked squarely in the eye and found wanting. This is a love story intent on disparaging all the others. Definitely not Mills and Boon.