That Ben Elton's Stark was written the best part of four decades ago is quite staggering. I won't spoil the plot for you but some of its more extreme prognostications are now echoingly pertinent.
Elton's early writing is like his early comedy - noisy, profane and driven by anger. It can at first be unsettling but once you have submitted to the authorial voice, this is an important book. I read it at the same time as I was conquering my fear of Jane Austen (see Advent 6) which made for quite a contrast. I do not share Elton's politics (no shit Sherlock) but I do have to admire his evisceration of the capital markets. Has anyone articulated the true socialist's bafflement better:
And so the house of cards came tumbling down. That fragile global structure behind which we all shelter. A castle, built on shifting sands from little more than faith, hope and greed, came tumbling down with a crash that shook the world. A mighty crash indeed, considering that the castle was not made of anything of any substance. In fact, it was a castle that existed only in the minds of men. Constructed from nothing more solid than the financial pages in newspapers and the blips on a million computer screens. It was not a castle built from iron, or steel, nor cotton, oil or food. It did not fail because there was no more coal left or because all the cows and sheep had died. There was no physical reason for its collapse, because it was made of nothing at all. You couldn't touch it, smell it or climb it, but without its shelter, despite the appalling heat of the southern summer and the mildest ever winter in the north, the world turned suddenly cold.
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