Sometimes I like to revisit a book I loved when I was younger just to see if it or I have changed! This doesn’t quite stand up to my earnest, newly environmentally aware teenage self who loved both the Young Ones and my new Greenpeace membership ( )

Ben Elton wrote some of the funniest television ever committed to video tape (think, for example, "Blackadder" and "The Young Ones") so I was looking forward to "Stark", his first foray into the novel form. Quite satirical in places and laughs, or at least smiles, throughout, "Stark" is worth a read although I couldn't help but be slightly disappointed once I put down the book. Later Elton books reinforced this disappointment, but I guess that's a story for another time. ( )

It's been about 20 years since I first read Stark and I still love it to bits. It's funny, memorable and touching, despite the disparate plots (and non-plot-releated wanderings) that form the main story. One of my favourite books. ( )

The weather has always been a source of endless conversation but now the mantra had changed. The song did not remain the same? Whereas previously the comment had always been along the lines of 'bloody awful weather . . .'
Now people constantly moaned that it was 'funny' weather; it was not like it had been when they were young; it was no longer 'proper' weather.. The strange thing was that even teenagers spoke in this manner.

Stark is a satire about billionaire businessmen, eco-warriors and the end of the world. It is set about 10 years after it was written and it's still relevant today, with the world failing to face up to global warming, pollution of the food chain and ships full of toxic waste sailing the oceans but never allowed to land and unload their deadly cargoes. The billionaires knew exactly how much trouble the world was in, and had hoped that somehow market forces might force them to do something about it, but as that never happened they just stood back and let it play out, while the hippies and journalists were unable to prevent the slide into disaster as they just weren't as ruthless and well-organised as their opponents.

'Listen, man,' Walter would say, 'like, one day you're freeing Beagles, the next you're riding the bus all night defending old ladies . . . I mean, cool, don't get me wrong, very cool. I just feel, like, we should, like . . . you know, formalize our avenues of protest, right. . .? Or does that sound a bit too much like heavy fascist mind control, and, like, pretty soon we'll be as bad as the people we're protesting against?'
'Well, it does a bit, man,' Zimmerman would reply.

This is Ben Elton's first novel and I first read it in 1989 or 1990 soon after it came out in paperback. I remember enjoying it a lot although I didn't remember much except what the title referred to and the location of the Stark Conspiracy's construction site and I have read a lot of his other novels since then and also saw Popcorn when the play was put on at Nottingham Playhouse. On re-reading it, I think his later novels are better, but there are moments of drama that come as a big shock between the laughs, and Stark introduced me to one of my favourite novelists, so it is definitely worthy of 4 stars. ( )

I think I laughed more reading this book than I have during live stand-up comedy. And I laugh a lot during stand-up. For some reason the description of the tree in the middle of the Australian desert 'dying' when there was a lack of water and then 'blossoming' when its deep root system finally tapped into the water table - and no one above ground being able to tell the difference - was the most hilarious thing I've ever read. In a way that is so good that you can't possibly explain it to others in a way they'll understand so I'll stop now.

A serious topic with such an underpinning of such gorgeous well-observed perfectly-balanced comedy that you can go in one end a suited conservative and emerge out the other a moccasin-wearing hippy without even noticing your internal progression. Almost made me want to vote green.

Brilliant.

Memorable.

Read it.

(twice) ( )