First book of 2010!
I was having dinner with my ex-girlfriend last Saturday (because, like all good lesbians, we are still excellent friends) and ended up picking up the book she’s had nestled at the foot of her toilet for the past couple of months - Chart Throb, one of Ben Elton’s newer novels. I’ve actually read a couple of his books before; and so far, they all seem uniformly light... and uniformly scathing of modern celebrity culture, reality TV and society’s diminishing privacy evinced by sites such as Facebook.
Chart Throb is basically a piss-take of those search for a star reality TV shows. The blurb on the back calls it “blistering comic satire with a savagely hilarious deconstruction of the world of modern television talent shows”. Other reviews are markedly less generous (for example Bill Greenwell from The Independent, who opinioned that Elton was “wasting paper ridiculing what is already utterly ridiculous”). Personally, I just find it odd reading something that nominally has a message but is written in a style as superficial and prosaic as the society it’s meant to be parodying.
Although yes, it was pretty entertaining.
Chart Throb is basically a piss-take of those search for a star reality TV shows. The blurb on the back calls it “blistering comic satire with a savagely hilarious deconstruction of the world of modern television talent shows”. Other reviews are markedly less generous (for example Bill Greenwell from The Independent, who opinioned that Elton was “wasting paper ridiculing what is already utterly ridiculous”). Personally, I just find it odd reading something that nominally has a message but is written in a style as superficial and prosaic as the society it’s meant to be parodying.
Although yes, it was pretty entertaining.