Ben Elton’s humour has all the subtlety of a brick; this is, after all, a guy who has collaborate with Rowan Atkinson. And I usually like that about him; he mocks the very things he embraces. (I still wistfully think of the witty, sarcastic literary baby he might have made with Jackie Collins.) He takes pot-shots at establishments that really need to have a few pot-shots taken at them. And my issue with his latest offering, Identity Crises, is that it takes pot-shots at a cause close to my heart, the #metoo movement.
Identity Crises follows ‘amiable, old-school’ detective Mick Matlock as he attempts to unravel a series of seemingly unrelated events. The first victim, a transgender male-to-female named Sammy, gets him into all sorts of trouble as first he suggests women be more vigilant when walking alone in parks, and then omitting the fact that Sammy is discovered to be pre-operation in the autopsy. (He would have faced the same level of backlash had he revealed it, thereby making an issue of it.) Elton is gleeful in taking the mick – no pun intended, although Elton may have intended it – of gender fluidity and its changing terms that get all but the most up-to-date Millennials in trouble for mis-speaking, however well-intentioned they may have been, eventually.
Then there is Jemina, a booted Love Island contestant* who cries non-consent retroactively; she consented at the time, see, when she thought it would save her getting booted off the island, but when the guy she fooled around with cut her anyway, well, that’s nonconsent by stealth. I get the ludicrousness of such a claim amid far more tragic and traumatic real-life examples, and I get that Elton was taking pot-shots at the kind of people who corrupt well-intentioned movements for their own petty gain, but the blanket dismissal of the #metoo movement felt incredibly disrespectful.
Then there’s Rodney Watson, a period actor who longs to be the next Colin Firth but acts closer to the next Jimmy Savile. He latches onto the #metoo movement for his own gain, see-sawing between acting deeply sympathetic towards victims for the cameras (while feeling up every pretty, subordinate woman he comes across) and lambasting the media for wanting to posthumously prosecute the likes of Samuels Pepys. Again, I get it – Elton is mocking those who exploit movements designed to hold them accountable – but Watson is just so damn creepy that you get some semblance of relief from his comeuppance.
The whole story is tied together with an overarching faux-Brexit, Russian meddling and fake news theme. The characters (those of whom make it to the final page) all get what’s coming to them. There’s a delightfully snide reference to our youth-obsessed culture and a twenty-five-year-old actress being too old to play speaker of the house.
I suspect my issues with the book are personal ones. I have had no issue when Elton takes his brand of humour and savages talent shows (Chart Throb) the one percent (Meltdown) or the culture of guns and violence (Popcorn). Which raises the question – do I simply not like it when Elton takes potshots at the things I cherish, or should something like #metoo me above mocking?
I’ll leave it as unresolved as Elton’s own attitudes in the book.
*Could not work out if it was a ‘real’ portrayal of the reality show or a hybrid of all the worst of them.
blackswanbookcorner 