Presently reading Frankie Boyle: My Sh!t Life So Far.
I’m really enjoying this one, I was on a train last week reading some of it, and I was honestly trying to not laugh out loud, I had to contort my face. I don’t know if its because I’m Glaswegian myself, but I just love his slightly droll, self-depricating, and casually cynical style, Sometimes he hovers over crossing the line in his choice of topics, but he’s got a knack for giving you comedy that can be at one moment straight forward talk, and the next it’s a really cheeky remark or observation.
Read a few books during the summer months, nothing too taxing though as my tiny brain can’t take heavy volumes of chapters or densely packed wordy tomes, so it was a couple of Ben Elton’s books and one of Douglas Coupland’s. I’ve read a lot of books by both authors over the years, almost but not quite everything, and not always in published order.
Douglas Coupland: Generation A.
Started off really well, It did hold my interest, and was an easy read, but when I got to the last third of the book I have to admit that I started losing interest. It’s the first book by him that I’ve not finished reading. Set in the near future it’s a tale that brings together five youthful characters from around the globe, all of whom speak in a typical world-weary, world-wise, consumer savvy style that is distinctively Coupland. In some ways though I was less convinced in this story by this than I’ve ever been in earlier works, and here I felt that the knowing attitude that was similarly prevalent in each of the characters felt unconvincing in being spread amongst them. I’d have preferred it if Coupland had kept their words as his voice alone throughout the book, rather than give them to the entire cast in his story, or maybe that was his point, the fact that these modern attitudes are now commonplace amongst the new generations due to the accessibility of global media.
What brings these five people together is that each is unexpectedly stung by a bee, this is in a world where we have started the destruction of our ecosystem, apparently beyond repair, and the return or existence of bees once again is seen as something of a miracle. The mystery in the story is not only how they have managed to return, but why they choose to seemingly seek out and sting only these five particular people. This event leads to a great deal of Coupland’s usual observations about modern day life as seen through the eyes of his media obsessed and internet affected characters.
Having been spirited away early in the story after being stung, to interrogation separately at a secret government facility, they are ultimately brought together for an undisclosed purpose, and later on in the book (and this is where I started to drift away) entire chapters are given over to imaginative story-telling produced by each of them whilst they remain under observation on a remote island.
Ben Elton: Blind Faith.
Enjoyed this one, it was something of a sci-fi at heart. It presents a disturbing and reasonably plausible world of society control through the media of home-entertainment and the internet, where privacy is outlawed, and conforming through liberal pleasures is encouraged, with total explicitness about ones life being not only expected, but to do otherwise is a crime.
For most of the book it’s a though-provoking and entertaining story where the parallels with Orwell’s 1984 are fairly obvious, but this is a fascist state that’s projected through a post consumer society, a modern world that has been reduced to a fabricated medieval mind-set due to global warming, where disease and fear are used as sticks to beat us with by the controlling powers, science is outlawed, and a new evangelical religion is at the helm.
The last few chapters took me by surprise, as just like with Winston Smith you knew it had to end badly, you hoped it wouldn’t, but it does, and the spectre of the Spanish Inquisition is alive and well at the heart of this tale.
Chart Throb.
A witty parody of X-Factor, and is right up Ben Eltons street with its celebrity ego’s and fragile vanities writ large, and I got quite a few laughs out of it. Calvin Simms (Simon Cowell) is expectedly smug, more smug, and smug again, and is something of a cruel user within his own little kingdom. Rodney Root (Louis Walsh) is the has-been under-dog minor celeb, not as powerfull as he’d like to think he is, and is basically Calvins tea-boy. Beryl Blenheim is a transexual mother (former father) with her own reality TV show The Blenheims, she’s a millionare ex-rocker and very bitchy, and she likes to present herself as a typical ordinary home-maker. Any similarity to Sharon Osbourne pretending to shop down at ASDA is a complete co-incidence, not.
