This is pretty bad. It’s supposed to be a satirical thriller of sorts. We have a film director, Bruce, who makes glossy amoral flicks in which a lot of people are glamorously killed. These films provoke a lot of moral outrage and anxiety about copycat crimes. He wins an Oscar for one of them. On the same night, he and his estranged family are taken hostage by two serial killers who claim inspiration from his films and want him to absolve them, live on TV, on that basis.
So far, so mid-90s: all this stuff was certainly in the air, and Elton clearly wants to take the piss out of it. But what, or who, exactly, does he want to take the piss out of? All the characters are types built for mockery: the vain director, the venal ex-wife, the shallow TV hosts, etc. Most of the scenes and situations are constructed so Elton can be rude about something in addition to the people: American TV programmes, awards ceremonies, Hollywood interiors, etc. Fair enough, mock the lot, but it does help for a satire to have an actual target, and it’s really not clear what it is here. American media? American films? American culture in general? I just don’t know.
It also helps if a satire is funny, and fatally, this isn’t. We get a lot of cheap, predictable shots: at the end of the novel, everyone sues each other, because, hey, America, they sue each other there. We get a lot of sneering and smirking. It’s all so tiresome.
I keep calling this a satire, rather than a comedy. That’s partly because the jacket copy call it a satire, and partly because it does seem that Elton wants to offer something like a critique of his targets, not just a send-up. You can tell this because a lot of characters are given to making windy speeches about moral responsibility, artistic freedom, and so on. This is all very well, but since Elton makes them all idiots, it’s far from clear what the critique or message is meant to be. The thought dawns after a while that Elton has no idea. He’s adopting a smug stance that suggests he does know what all these people ought to be saying, how one can square away the competing demands, but he doesn’t. It’s a totally insincere performance, raising shallow questions in the hope of seeming profound, refusing to answer them in the hope of seeming wise.
OK, so the book fails on the satirical bit. Does it at least work as a thriller? Nope. The main problem is that Elton adopts a needlessly tortuous structure, involving flashbacks, flashforwards, occasional gimmicky cuts to descriptions of film scenes, different points of view, etc. For one thing, this means that we know more or less what’s going to happen at the end of the book more or less from the beginning. How will the hostage situation end? No tension there. For another thing, it means that Elton ends up repeating the same stuff two or more times, in flashback, in the present, from different perspectives. This happens so often it must be deliberate, but it’s very tedious and kills the book’s momentum. As does Elton’s habit of occasionally switching from normal prose to a screenplay-style format at moments of drama, which slows the reading right down and drains the drama right out.
The book is also badly, lazily written at the level of word and sentence. There’s a marked inconsistency of vernacular. The book is set in the USA, and adopts a good deal of ersatz American terminology (“babes”, “sodas”), but then mixes this us with incorrigibly British words. There’s an irritating reliance on the word “indeed” to signal ironic distance from proceedings. There’s evidence that Elton either doesn’t know or doesn’t care what “prostrate” actually means. And so on and so on. I could pull dozens of examples, but I don’t have the will and nor do you.
I will mention one last thing, though: the tits. God, this novel is full of boobies, being ogled, admired and felt by the cast of slimy men. Now, naturally, all this shameful behaviour is attributed to the characters rather than the author, but there’s so much tittiness that it’s impossible not to think Elton is in close attendance, rubbing his thighs and panting slightly. Which is of course just what the critics say about the violence in Bruce’s films: it might be just a story, but you wrote it. The one true irony of the book, and the only one that Elton didn’t mean.