The youngest of four, he went to Godalming Grammar school, joined amateur dramatic societies and wrote his first play at 15. Few authors do satire as well as Ben Elton and this seems to be his vent on everything that is absurd and simply wrong in our modern social media, PC correct world.

However, its depiction of life is a little too on the nose and realistic, rather than exaggerated, ironic or ridiculous as satire demands. However to suggest that all identity and gender politics are that way, or that we shouldn't bother to respect people's choices, or that there isn't a problematic trend of the patriachy talking over women and of white people talking over people of colour would be disingenuous. We see Bunter Jolly (Boris Johnson), Guppy Toad (Michael Gove) and Greased-Hogg (Jacob Rees-Mogg) as unwitting playthings of Putin, working to further their own power and accidentally increasing Putin’s stranglehold at the same time.It all seems to be lumped in together as "PC bullshit" and "identity politics taken too far" and I just . My least likeable character was Malaki because I felt, with her background (including honest parents and top-notch education), she had a responsibility to be a better person.

Expressions like ‘toxic’ and ‘on the wrong side of history’ crop up a lot in the first half of the book, and really cement the idea that we’re reading a contemporary satire. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.It serves as an indication of the author’s intention to ultimately bring all the various plotlines together.

Overall: I really enjoyed it, but I think if you've never read Ben Elton you'd be better off reading one of his older satire novels to get a taste before trying this one. Honestly, I’ve never seen it, and I’m somewhat out of my depth talking about it…) comes forward to accuse another contestant of having non-consensually kissed her on television. Again, like his previous satire novels, the storyline is both ridiculous and yet also scarily believable.A single blow to the back of the head kills a young woman, no evidence of robbery, no evidence of assault beyond the death blow, no evidence period. I think it's really important that people's pronoun choices are respected and that people have the opportunity to claim their gender and sexual identity and have that choice respected regardless of whether you can imagine being asexual or nonbinary. Even more so when Matlock very publicly struggles to get his middle-aged head around the notion of Sammy’s chosen pronouns. Elton has his finger firmly on the zeitgeist of the times as he has his dig at Harvey Weinstein, interfering in political elections from foreign powers, political correctness, ultra-feminism, social media, immigration, fake news, Brexit. It drops a heart in my rating for Rothfuss’ depiction of women – far too much objectification for my liking, even when he’s trying to avoid it.

By the end, it turns out the Russians are bumping off all these people in collaboration with a Cambridge Analytica-type organisation, so they can turn their deaths into more culture war fodder, push through Brexit, and destabilise the UK. Ben Elton is fiercely intelligent and this is one of the most intellectually satisfying books I have read for a long time. I also happen to think that this is a genuinely funny book and the ridiculousness of some of the scenarios just highlight a lessor truth. However, the two last books and my favourites from Elton were: The Two Brothers and Time and Time Again which were of a different style to earlier novels and with Identity Crisis I feel Ben has shifted back to his earlier self. He wanted to be a stagehand at the local theatre, but instead did A-Level Theatre Studies and studied drama at Manchester University in 1977.I have left this story with deep thoughts about several issues which I am still pondering about and this means I have been highly influenced by this book and will be thinking about it for a long time. I have learnt so much about the current trends in social media that I didn’t fully know about (and I actually use social media).