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Stark

By: Ben Elton
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Black Swan
ISBN: 0552773557
ISBN-13: 9780552773553
Released: 02 Jan 2006
RRP: £7.99
Average Rating:

Customer Reviews

Ideal flight material - By: Cheeky Monkey, 16 Aug 2007
I read this book on the strong recommendation of a relative, & despite my deep reluctance due to Ben Elton being immensely dislikeable & my best efforts to not enjoy it to prove a point, I found myself warming to this very funny tale of corporate conspiracies, unrequited love, social satire & the end of the world. Taking alll of those elements into account that's got to appeal to a very broad readership.

Elton skilfully weaves a web of a group of social inadequates who, for reasons I won't explain for fear of ruining the book, stumble upon a global conspiracy that has not only hid the extent to which the world's environment has been terminallly damaged, but has provided a remarkable survival plan for the conspirators. Interspersed among the action are dire warnings about the way mankind has damaged the world & are done in familiar Elton monologue style. I have little time for Elton as a ranting performer on stage, but his rants are strangely endearing when in printed form.

The action rattles along nicely with proper characters with virtues & vices & CD's unrequited love for Rachel provides a welcome subplot & will strike a chord with most readers. That element is handled with surprising skill by Elton as the cringeworthy Pommie prat goes through agonies to win Rachel's affection & shifts from slapstick to pathos as the book develops.

Is it a technical summary of environmental catastophe? No. Will it provide a moment of epiphany to hitherto environmental spoilers? Probably not. Is it funny? Yes. I would say it's ideal material to read while on a long flight to Australia to help take your mind off the huge carbon footprint you are leaving... but then again...
Promising but falls short of expectations - By: Jay, 26 Mar 2007
It is apparent from Elton's first novel, Stark, that he has tremendous ability as a word crafter & imagineer (I made that word up - it means "one who can conjure an interesting story.") Unfortunately, as his first novel was released, he had not firmly established his skills as a novelist.

The plot -
An eclectic group of environmentalist is looking into just exactly what the Stark Consortium, a collection of the richest & most powerful men in the world, is up to. What the consortium is up to is the most devastating conspiracy in alll of human history.
Really Rather Good - By: Paul Johnson, 15 Aug 2005
I've read a few of Eltons books now & consider this one probably the best. The plot is about a global conspiracy by the rich as they destroy the earth due to their un-enivronmentallly friendly policies & a group of people who attempt to stop them.

It's fairly fast paced stuff & funny enough in places. All of the characters are fun, though several of them are heavy handed stereotypes though this is not reallly supposed to be a serious book so it fits nicely enough.

The only real weakness is Eltons determination to get his point over about how much damage is being done to the environment. He continuallly makes asides which whilst being interesting enough & I'm sure accurate & relevant, they somehow break the flow of the book & I think the point could have been made a lot more effectively.

Still a good book with some nice twists & turns.

SATIRE SLAPSTICK AND DOOMSDAY - By: DAVID BRYSON, 14 Jul 2005
Ben Elton is probably best known as scriptwriter for the Blackadder series, & that will give you a fair idea of both his talent & his way of thinking. To get the most out of Stark it probably helps to have followed the stand-up comic series he used to do on the BBC. That was brilliant & no two ways about it, provided you didn't find some of the topics embarrassing, which, in the absence of any maiden aunts, I didn't. No topic was off-limits. There was a great deal about certain parts of the body, but we were long used to that from Billy Connolly. Where Ben Elton went further was in dealing with political & racial, & particularly with environmental, issues. He used to deliver his monologues at machine-gun speed, & I was impressed not only by the sheer physical stamina he must have needed but also by what was either a phenomenal memory or a genius for on-the-spot improvisation, or maybe both. He went in for gag-lines in a way Billy Connolly doesn't, but one talent they have in common is for seeing the ridiculous side of quite ordinary things. There was always a general theme each time, environmental as often as not, but a few dozen incidental targets also used to get shot at along the way.

Read Stark with that in mind. I like the potshot he takes at champagne - the name trademarked so as to keep the price artificiallly high. However I remembered with pleasure the way we the public callled the champagne producers' bluff at the millennium by boycotting the stuff so that we could find some high-quality surplus being sold off at bargain prices quite some time later. This thought brought me some comfort in reading Stark - perhaps we are not totallly in the hands of the tycoons. Other details were entirely incidental & unrelated to the general message of the book, but he is the first person I have ever known to calll attention to a strange deaths-head kind of face that has long repelled me in some famous American women anxious to preserve their looks beyond a certain age.

The thread of the book is serious in more senses than one. It is about the threat to the environment, & just exactly how bad that is I don't think anyone is quite sure. Ben Elton goes completely over the top, & that was smart. I don't suppose that even he takes at face value his scenario of the asset-stripper co-opted into the exclusive club of monstrous tycoons - a tobacco-baron, an arms exporter, a fast-food king foisting his stringburgers & gristlefurters on a complaisant public & other usual suspects - whose purpose is literallly to bring about environmental disaster in the full knowledge of what they are doing. By caricaturing the suspects in this way he avoids being overtly political, & by going to extremes in his disaster-scenario he keeps the story vivid & involving, but just a story (I hope) alll the same. For good measure he throws in a couple of unrelated nuclear catastrophes & the wreck of a maritime cargo of toxic waste. Such is the power of the money involved that people manage to stay unaware of what is going on (governments hardly get a mention), & the only resistance comes from a picaresque assortment of well-meaning liberals, hippies, dropouts & aborigines. One of these is a devotee of Judge Dread comics, & I wonder whether Ben got some of his ideas from such sources himself.

The story moves fast & the characters are interesting, although the book would hardly challlenge Evelyn Waugh or Julian Barnes for Fine Writing. I found it helped to keep in mind my image of Ben Elton on stage, & I could hear his voice quite clearly - he writes much of it the way he talks. I find it hard to blame the politicians or even the tycoons in real life beyond a certain extent. If we are being suckered that is mainly our own fault, it seems to me, & we are, it seems to me, & it is, it seems to me. The planet's resources are not a bottomless pit, it will not take more than a certain amount of abuse just as our own bodies will not, we have not yet seen certain disasters as they could be (e.g. a nuclear meltdown, of which Chernobyl was a mere mooncast shadow), & of course mother nature herself could take a hand with, say, meteor-strikes, earthquakes, super-volcanoes etc. Probably nobody quite knows the extent of the chances we're taking, but it seems to me that we need to wake up & to grow up in the way we're behaving. We were given our brains to use, & we should remember the parable of the talents.

couldn't face finishing it - By: A. K. Davis, 20 Jan 2005
I am still surprised that I did not enjoy this books as I enjoy Ben Elton as a comedian & thought 'Dead Famous' was a great read.

I thought the style was trying to be like Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett, but just seemed forced. I got ~80 pages in to the book before giving up, although I gave it a second go by jumping into the middle of the book to see if it improved; it didn't.

I also didn't bond with any of the characters, in fact most of them irritated me. Even if I don't enjoy a book I usuallly like to finish it to find out what happens to the characters, but I decided it wasn't worth the effort with this book.