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 (view spoiler)[what the title referred to and the location of the Stark Conspiracy's construction site (hide spoiler)]
This book was recommended to me by Frankie Seymour, an environmental scientist, since I write in the field. Along with others which I am currently ploughing through :-) I didn't like its style to begin with, too choppy, moving among the characters too fast. Also there was absolutely no one I could relate to. The "good guys" drove me crazy and the philosophy of the bad guys gave me the absolute horrors. I could see why Frankie recommended it but it was a struggle to get through. Not at all what I had come to expect of Ben Elton from his TV work. It was interesting to see my home town feature, though Elton's habit of replacing actual town names with cutesy fake ones, i.e. Kalgoorlatta (I think; can't locate it now) and the USS Enormous for an American aircraft carrier.This puts me in a quandary as to rating, because I can't say I liked it but I couldn't put it down until I had finished it and perhaps a person needs to have their pants scared off them on this subject.
What do You think about Stark (2006)?
An earlier version of his other story on environmental catastrophe 'This Other Eden', this one is more thoroughly fleshed out, with more interesting characters and detailed plot. The jokes are also funnier, while the idea of an ecological 'vanishing point' of no return for the Earth is very prescient for a book written in 1989 - when the threat of Nuclear Armageddon was of higher concern than environmental destruction. Sadly, the intervening two decades since then has only seen the situation deteriorate further in reality. It seems unlikely we can carry on BAU practices another 20 years without breaching the Earth's carrying capacity with fatal consequences for civilisation.
—Ryan
This was the first Ben Elton book i read and i really enjoyed it. It is a good novel by comedian Ben Elton, that deals with a topic as relevant now as it was then, in 1989. It deals heavily with the issue of pollution and the environment, however the theme cannot be said to be subtle or underlying. It is the main focus of the book, and everything revolves around the subject. But Elton is also capable of making intelligent, funny, acute comments on everyday things that I had not thought of before.
—Michael
Though it took me twenty years to discover that Ben Elton wrote books (I knew of him through TV's The Young Ones, Blackadder, and The Thin Blue Line), I've always loved his acerbic wit aimed at the stupidity and indifference of people. His stand-up and television sitcom scripts have always been on my desert island favourites, so imagine my joy at discovering that he's had an equally successful career in writing narratives for the last two decades.It's scary knowing that when this book came out in 1989 the very things Elton was talking about have come closer to fruition. In an odd way - and only Elton could accomplish this convincingly - it's also amusing to see that we haven't really done all that much to change things.Not wanting to give anything away, I HIGHLY receommend this book. Elton's characteristic humour and anger co-exist wonderfully well in the narrative form (anyone who's heard Elton's stand-up will instantly recognise his voice here), and while he successfully entertains, Elton also manages to inform and hopefully inspire people to do the right thing.
—Chris Leib
