Identity Crisis

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Without wishing to offend anybody, I found the ‘trying to please all the people all the time’ and social tip toeing around free speech and even free thought a real concern and even a real future possibility.

It serves as an indication of the author’s intention to ultimately bring all the various plotlines together. With new gender pronouns seeming to arrive on a daily basis, another group claiming they are marginalised because of their colour/gender/sexuality (or lack thereof)/taste in biscuits and demanding that they be positively discriminated against.

Other people who are involved in culture-war issues also keep turning up murdered or having committed suicide, including a TERF, a prominent feminist historian spearheading a terribly silly campaign to retrospectively prosecute Samuel Pepys for sexual abuse, the sexual predator actor she worked with, a couple of Christian hotel owners who turned away a gay couple, a far-right incel, a Black girl on a council estate, and a straight couple on a queer edition of Love Island. Given this, the omniscient, distant third person perspective prevented me from getting as close to the characters and engaging in their internal worlds as much as I would have liked. There's a campy thread that goes throughout the book that felt like it would have been the far more compelling (and satisfying) thread to follow. However, the two last books and my favourites from Elton were: The Two Brothers and Time and Time Again which were of a different style to earlier novels and with Identity Crisis I feel Ben has shifted back to his earlier self. I recognize that reality TV shows are now here to stay and most of them frustrate me: but, perhaps I am tired of reading about the tricks and deceit behind the ‘reality’.

Whilst we all know, and are relatively inured to, the national media having their own political axe to grind we are less aware of the political leanings of Social Media or even who is responsible for those provocative hashtags. I'm going to say upfront that while I really enjoyed this book, I'm not sure the humour would be for everyone. This gives him a remarkable amount of wriggle room to explore topics, by weaving in and out of the facts like dodgems. Ben Elton’s Identity Crisis is a dreary, unentertaining and uninspired “satire” - confirmation bias in book form for the olds that modern stuff is rubbish.I picked this up because Audible pushed it as a recommendation and because I fancied a break from fantasy. I generally find Ben Elton's satire better than his plot (other than Two Brothers which is masterful). Largely it depends on the author's intentions, which, despite having read all 400 odd pages of this book, I still can't really pin down.