I do feel slightly guilty for disliking things Ben Elton writes. After all, he is one of the people behind Blackadder. Unfortunately, it turns out he's not exactly a great novelist.



Blind Faith is set in a future where climate change has flooded much of the Earth, overcrowding is everpresent, and people have turned their back on science and reason. Instead, society is a voyeuristic, exhibitionist, faith-based, reality-TV like mess. Everyone live streams almost every moment of their lives on the w

I do feel slightly guilty for disliking things Ben Elton writes. After all, he is one of the people behind Blackadder. Unfortunately, it turns out he's not exactly a great novelist.



Blind Faith is set in a future where climate change has flooded much of the Earth, overcrowding is everpresent, and people have turned their back on science and reason. Instead, society is a voyeuristic, exhibitionist, faith-based, reality-TV like mess. Everyone live streams almost every moment of their lives on the web; everyone has videos compiled of their most private memories (losing virginities, giving birth, etc.) and is sharing them with the entire world; and faith leaders control the society with an Inquisition and barbaric methods, while people are quick to form angry mobs that turn on individuals, screaming "pedo" and tearing them apart. Oh, and everyone is overweight, all the food is full of sugar, and people practice no self-restraint and celebrate themselves all the time.



In this mess lives Trafford, a man who rather likes privacy and has a sense of dignity / shame. He has a wife. They have a baby. And one day, someone suggests he might want to commit one of the vilest crimes of all, and vaccinate her (vaccines are heresy), in order to protect her from the many, many lethal plagues that decimate children (mumps, measles, etc.)



Trafford is one of those dystopian nobody-heroes that instantly remind the reader of 1984, Brave New World, Brazil, and other classics. A completely downtrodden little unimportant cog. Fine. Something sparks, and suddenly there are deadly secrets and subversion in his life. So far so good. Unfortunately, the book falls flat in almost every other regard.



Let's start with the little things: suspension of disbelief. It's impossible. Seriously, a world as overcrowded as this society could not sustain itself. Everyone eating all the time is a nice idea, but in a flooded world, where does the food grow? Talking of floods, sure, global warming will raise sea levels, but the effects in this book are Waterworldian - far beyond the credible. Even if we believe all that, how could this society of uneducated imbeciles (at one point, a book that isn't written for children is described as a challenge) ever function? People who make or repair plasma screens, fix internet connections, design buildings, etc. etc. etc. - they all need some measure of education.



Even if we assume suspension of disbelief (thanks to a generous portion of goodwill), the book disappoints. It isn't particularly funny, nor original, and all the points it makes are so unbelievably obvious, its satire is so ham-fisted, that it feels like a book written for ten year olds. Except for the sex in it, of course.



Ben Elton is the writer who is the quickest at noticing some cultural trend, and who pounces on it, writing and publishing a novel while even our short tabloid-fuelled attention span has not wandered away. He wrote Popcorn, about Natural Born Killers and Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino style movies. He wrote Past Mortem, while Friends Reunited had not yet been dethroned by MySpace and Facebook. He wrote House Arrest, while Big Brother was still new and fashionable. You get the drift. Whatever fad starts to get noticed by tabloids, Ben Elton sniffs it out and lambasts it in a novel. Here, he concentrates his fire on social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace (I think it's called Facespace in the book), the Jerry Springer generation / experience, and anti-science backlash.



It all feels horrendously frustrating. He creates a world so he can criticise it. He creates characters so we can resent them. Fine, I resent them, but I don't read books just so I can hate all the characters and their world. There needs to be something more - and in this novel, there isn't. The plot is never truely tense, it follows the dystopia template so closely that you sort of know how it's going to end before you've even met all the characters, and the lack of subtlety comes across as shallow and stupid. It's a bit as if someone had taken a Banksy graffiti and turned it into a novel. (Nothing against Banksy - some of his work is funny and satirical and enjoyable - but it's meant for one wall, not for 300 pages)



All in all, a waste of time.