Some Reviews
The Daily Telegraph: Boldly over the parapet
How Ben Elton novels have changed.
The First Casualty, all faded sepia with a wistful watercolour poppy forming the "o" of Elton, wouldn't look out of place on your granny's bedside table. And your granny might well enjoy it.
Elton's 10th novel is set in 1917 and concerns a London copper called Douglas Kingsley (the Yard's finest, naturally) who, imprisoned as a conchie, has his death faked by the secret service and is sent to Ypres to solve a murder. The victim is Viscount Abercrombie, a secretly gay "celebrity poet" and aristocratic war hero, who, having lost his lover to the trenches, decides to take up the white feather himself.
So we have a thriller, a war story and a breathless re-imagining of the author's favourite political heroes. Ramsey MacDonald and Arthur Henderson dash about London in a cloud of righteous good humour, playing off mad Fenians against snooty toffs and taking tea in Socialist salons on the Embankment. Meanwhile, Kingsley lurks around town incognito, then goes off to the trenches and accidentally becomes decorated for saving a platoon while trying to recover evidence under enemy fire.
Sounds a little far-fetched? Try this for size: left alone for 24 hours by his trusting SIS kidnappers, Kingsley breaks in to his family home, hides behind a hat-stand to spy on his wife, then kisses his son goodnight, confident that his posthumous appearance will be passed off as just a dream. Oh, and his nom de guerre is Captain Christopher Marlowe ("He was a spy you know," we are helpfully informed).
But some dodgy plotting can be overlooked when the prose is good - and in parts Elton's is brilliant. Riveting action-scenes bristle with a queasy energy, the nightmare of the third battle of Ypres coming horribly alive as we follow Kingsley over the parapet. Here the book is unputdownable and disgustingly realistic.
Less successful are the scenes of sub-Flashman gung-hoity, such as Kingsley's intervention in the rape of Violet the Chambermaid by a randy officer. (Kingsley: "Unhand that girl!" Rapist: "There's something bracing about taking a helpless little bird and breaking its wings, don't ye know.")
But this unlikely novel is a reminder that Elton is a tireless thinker as well as a pundit, and as he grapples with the moral vacuum at the heart of the war to end all wars he boldly goes exactly where he always does - to the heart of the matter. And he gives us a good many laughs along the way.
The Independent: The First Casualty, by Ben Elton , Floundering in Flanders fields
Review by Jane Jakeman
It would be easy to say that this book - Elton's first serious work, set in 1917 - is his best comic novel. No period cliché escapes our author. The hero, Inspector Douglas Kingsley, has a wife with golden curls and shapely ankles. When Kingsley becomes a conscientious objector, said golden-haired spouse leaves a white feather in the matrimonial bed and the cook gives notice.
Kingsley is dragged from prison and drafted into the army under a false name. He is sent to Flanders to find the murderer of an aristocratic officer who has apparently been shot by a shell-shocked soldier whom he disciplined. The victim was a member of the Lavender Lamp Club, where poeticising gays trail around in silk dressing-gowns.
I didn't think I would ever actually encounter phrases such as "unhand me!" and "his straining manhood" in a modern novel. Such staples of romance novels sit queasily alongside Elton's usual obsessions with defecation and masturbation, interspersed with undigested information. The effect is that of a Barbara Cartland story re-written by a dirty-minded schoolboy during a monotonous history lesson.
The preposterous plot is given no credibility by dragging in every historical signpost. Think 1917: think suffragettes, Ireland, Ivor Novello... The pages are filled with period detail, but the tone is often disastrously wrong. Lloyd George whizzes across the page, but that superbly articulate politician talks like a Welsh village idiot. Elton cannot abandon the cartoon techniques which served him well in Blackadder.
Nevertheless, his boldness in going over the same blood-soaked Flanders fields as Sebastian Faulks and Pat Barker bears fruit - if the reader can plough through the first 200 pages. When the hero gets to the front line, the book moves onto a different plane. All the facetiousness knocked out of him, Elton records the terrible experiences through the eyes of a former conscientious objector. A hundred relentless pages fill the reader with pity and horror: partly because we know the dreadful details are based on fact, but also because they raise the writer's game. Under the force of such material, even Elton's cardboard characters take on human dimensions.
The metamorphosis does not last. Kingsley escapes from his duty and finds the (fairly obvious) solution to his mystery. The book falls back again into sniggering mode and the relentless fusillade of clichés resumes. Our policeman-soldier makes it back to Blighty and "the lips he had thought lost to him forever".
Yet a literary issue remains. If the First World War has such powerful resonances that it can impart genuine feeling to a work by Ben Elton, perhaps we credit its other fictional chroniclers with a transcendent power that properly belongs to the historical truth. Is it Faulks's skill that makes Birdsong so compelling, or the power of his material? Be grateful to Elton for demonstrating the "war effect".
Jane Jakeman's 'In the Kingdom of Mists' is published by Black Swan
