Book review

As I clear some space in my bookshelves for the inevitable Christmas deluge, I decided to read Ben Elton's This Other Eden, a novel I had not perused at all since buying many years ago. It is surprisingly topical considering it was first published in 1993, what with its central theme revolving around the destruction of the environment and people making individual decisions to a collective problem, leading them to declare it's a problem too vast for them so they do nothing to prevent it. People are encouraged to live in self-supporting biodomes in the mid-21st Century to survive the moment when the earth becomes uninhabitable through their activities; the leaders of the green movement are in cahoots with those marketing the biodomes, but don't think I've given away the plot as there's much more to it and plenty of personal interest besides, the latter becoming the main thing towards the end. Even the "I'm-going-to-tell-my-villainous-plan-before-I-kill-you" shtick is handled smartly. And the chief bad guy is a media tycoon not unlike the one currently apologising in the news for giving a disgraced American football player/film star more publicity than the American public can stomach. Despite a few post-modern attempts at literary conceits and the tad self-congratulatory ironic twists, the book is no high art, but it doesn't intend to be, rather its ambition is to be the (not-so) original page turner, testified by me reading the last 250 pages - more than half the book - in half a day. Airport fodder then, but it serves its purpose well.