Gridlock - Ben Elton

Wondering why I update this site lots now?

It's because I DO read a lot, silly.

At the Yorkshire Dales camp, this book was first to go; it has been taunting me in the flat kitchen for awhile now. Knowing Elton's humour pedigree (Blackadder ring a bell, anyone?), I was eager to pick this tome up. And a rollicking laugh I had, but at the same time, a few hard questions made an indelible mark.

It's a comic romp through London, and a LOT of the UK, describing how a disabled nuclear physicist and an equally disabled university student take on the insidiuous forces that want to lay down a comprehensive UK road network. Elton pits Digby, the Minister of Public Transport, who is secretly getting kickbacks from the Road Lobby (an insidious force throughout the novel), against the two protagonists, and Toff, a rhyme-wielding gangsta rappa turned full-blooded parking attendant.

The jokes get a little crass at times; he, sometimes, is unable to make that seamless transition from one-liner to full-blown 400-page gagfest. Otherwise, through the humour, there is ample fodder to mull over.

He exposes the extent of the road and oil lobby as a deciding factor impeding progress on public transport issues. The plans for a hydrogen car, Geoffrey the disabled nuclear physicist, maintain, cannot be used to aid the private transport industry; he intends to sell them to the public transport industry, but is dealt a fatal blow by Digby's surrogate henchmen before that.

Issues such as disability, the environmental damage of private transport, the influence of lobby groups on political decisions, discrimination and prejudice, are all handled deftly by Elton via humour. The novel ends with a victory for the private transport lobby; but Elton makes it sound so ironic, so unflatteringly blase, that the car lobby seems to have won a Pyrhhic victory.

Twists abound; the car chase at the end is 100 pages of pure laugh-out-loud-on-bus (to disgust of fellow commuters, no doubt.) Elton's gags seem a little contrived at times; he abandons all semblance of realism midway through the book, sending Deborah the wheelchair-bound student dodging lamp-posts and setting off wheelchair-operated explosives, all thanks to her physicist lover. Mental abuse is also inflicted throughout on the antagonists; lovely Digby suffers an inglorious political fall from grace midway after his sexuality dogs him in the midst of a major party policy speech.

Funny, no doubt; but raising issues that you would never imagine were linked.

I give it a 7.5/10.