Internationally recognised art and literary critic, writer and cultural producer. Published in ELLE, Glamour, Esquire and Cosmopolitan; member of the Union of Writers.
There is a particular kind of British comedy, a strain of satire perfected in smoky panel shows and righteous stand-up specials, that has become one of our most reliable cultural exports. Its chief proposition is that the world has gone barking mad, that all sides of any given argument are populated by shrieking fanatics or morons, and that the only sane position left is that of the wry, exasperated observer, shaking his head at the sheer bloody absurdity of it all. It is a posture of intelligent, weary superiority. Ben Elton, a founding father of this school, has returned with Identity Crisis, a novel that is less a book and more a perfectly engineered delivery system for this exact worldview. It is being hailed as a provocative, hilarious, and much-needed takedown of our modern ills.
It is nothing of the sort.
Elton’s novel is not a cure for our cultural malaise. It is a high-grade palliative, a beautifully crafted entertainment that soothes the symptoms of our political exhaustion while leaving the disease to fester. Its true, unstated subject is not the culture war, but the lucrative market for the culture war. The book is a brilliant, funny, and profoundly cynical product that confirms our deepest fear – that everything is a meaningless, manipulated farce – and then sells that confirmation back to us as a form of fun. It is the chief export of a profitable and profoundly enervating nihilism.
A Perfectly Marketable Despair
The novel’s plot, if one can call it that, is a masterclass in this very transaction. A shadowy tech corporation, the ‘Fishing Fleet’, has a simple business model: ‘They find the shit. You stir it.’ Their job is to identify nascent cultural anxieties – the ‘potential controversies’ – and weaponize them for their clients, feeding them into the social media ecosystem where they blossom into full-blown moral panics. This, Elton’s novel cheekily suggests, is where our opinions come from. It’s a neat trick. A profitable one, too.
The profound irony, of course, is that this is a perfect description of the novel’s own methodology. Ben Elton is the Fishing Fleet. He has spent his career trawling the depths of the culture, finding the ‘shit’ – the hypocrisies of the left, the idiocies of the right, the linguistic contortions of the perpetually offended – and then stirring it into a bestselling comedy. The book is not an exposé of the machine; it is a demonstration model. It reveals the cynical mechanics of outrage-mongering whilst simultaneously being a premium example of it.
We are invited to laugh at the evangelical Christians who want to pray for a gay couple, and then at the gay couple who tell them where they can stick their prayers. We chuckle at the veteran cop, Mick Matlock, being told by a bright young thing that he can no longer use the word ‘victim’ to describe a murder victim, as it ‘disempowers’ her. We nod along as a character opines that if you’re not a vegan monk, you have no right to preach about your ‘eco-friendly artisanal Cumbrian sausages’. Each jab is perfectly balanced, each side is made to look equally ridiculous.
The effect of this is not clarity. It is paralysis. It fosters a smug, prophylactic cynicism in the reader, a feeling of being above the fray. We are flattered into believing that we, unlike the poor saps in the book, are smart enough to see the absurdity of it all. This is the most seductive, and most dangerous, illusion of all. It is a cheap form of wisdom that requires no conviction, no difficult choices, and no intellectual heavy lifting. It is the ideological equivalent of a quiet life.
The Comfort of the Confused Man
The novel’s ostensible hero, Detective Inspector Mick Matlock, is the avatar for this intended reader. He is an old-school copper, a man of simple tastes – he likes rock and roll, he misses the days when things were just normal – who finds himself utterly bewildered by the brave new world of pronouns, microaggressions, and competitive victimhood. He is decent, competent, and terminally confused. His bafflement is our comfort. He is the anchor of ‘common sense’ in a sea of madness.
God knows, it’s an appealing fantasy. But Matlock’s common sense is utterly impotent. He solves the murders, yes, but he cannot solve the world. He is a relic, and his confusion is the primary emotional experience the book is selling. We are meant to identify with his weary sigh, to see ourselves in his inability to keep up. He is the permission slip for our own exhaustion.
I was at a comedy club in London in the late nineties, watching a comedian whose entire act was built on this very premise. He’d read out two contradictory headlines from the day’s papers, shrug theatrically, and say, ‘It’s all mad, isn’t it?’ The audience would roar with laughter – the laughter of relief. It was the sound of people being absolved of the difficult duty of having to make sense of the world. It’s the same laughter Elton is chasing here.
And just when the relentless satire threatens to become wearying in itself, Elton, a master of genre, throws in a spoonful of sugar. A will-they-won’t-they office romance between a ‘sexy Asian mathematical genius’ and her ‘toxic alpha-male’ boss. It is a deliberate, cynical, and commercially astute concession to the conventions of the very mainstream entertainment the rest of the novel purports to skewer. The brilliant, progressive woman, we are told, is secretly thrilled by his patriarchal decisiveness. ‘Fuck them,’ she thinks of her feminist university friends. ‘She liked decisive men.’ It is a perfect little culture-war grenade, designed to annoy all the right people, whilst also functioning as a classic, simple, plot device. It’s a cheap thrill.
Perhaps I’m mistaken, but the ultimate legacy of this kind of satire is not insight, but a kind of pleasurable despair. It is the literary equivalent of a doom-scrolling session that makes you feel smart. It confirms that the game is rigged, the players are all fools, and the only winning move is not to play. Just sit back, buy the book, and enjoy the show.
The novel is not a call to arms. It is a beautifully written, exquisitely structured, and often very funny invitation to give up. It is a mirror held up to a society that has become so saturated with performative outrage that the only authentic feeling left is a weary, profitable cynicism. And as we chuckle along, another murder is committed, another referendum is manipulated, and the Fishing Fleet sails on, its nets full, ready to sell us tomorrow’s rage. It’s a very old story. And it is, one must admit, terribly funny. Until it isn’t.
