Ben Elton gets a lot of slagging for supposedly "selling out" but i've always found his fiction very readable. And I enjoyed this as much as I have his other books. A clever look at the implications of current drug legislation and what legalisation could mean.

Reading a novel by Ben Elton is like watching an episode of your favourite TV show. He never fails to deliver.

High Society is about a whole heaps of characters they are involved in the drug industry. From the drugged up pop-star to the junkie on the street and all sorts of drug users in between... Did I just make the book sound boring? I think I did, but I do like Ben Elton and so I read it.... and it was pretty darn good.

The book jumps around a lot. Without any indication we are reading both past and present at different speeds, which sounds confusing but it was strangely very easy to follow. The characters were all very likeable, and there was a really strong storyline (this would make a great movie).

If I were trying to get someone hooked on Ben Elton I would suggest Blind Faith or Chart Throb or Dead Famous first.

Lives and loves of the whores, pimps, rockstars, and politicians involved in the drug trade in early 2000s London and Birmingham. Elton's fragmented novel is a passionate plea for drug legalization, but largely a cliched celebrity tale, and its message is subverted by the most predictable and downer of endings.

Just because you have a bunch of characters, different narrators and voices and locations, doesn't mean you've told a complete tale. For three-quarters of the book, the characters don't even seem real, just uber-examples of types that might be involved in a celebrity drug story. There's a nearly-constant dreaded sense of "ok, here comes the moralistic ending." The book isn't UN-funny, it's simply not funny, which isn't any better. Near the end it started picking up momentum, I started to care more about the characters, and I actually got excited about reading it for a while. Maybe Elton isn't going for the obvious? Ah, sadly, no--my hopes for something different and uncliched gets thwarted again. Save your time on this one and go rent Drugstore Cowboy, Trainspotting, and/or Requiem For A Dream instead.

I really got into this book about a quarter of the way through. It is the fascinating telling of drugs in the UK. A politician wants to introduce a Bill legalizing all drugs, thus removing all associated criminality. At the same time as this is unfolding, a famous pop star is telling his story about his own drug taking, and about the young Scottish prostitute it falls in love with. I really good, thought-provoking read if you don't mind colourful language!

This book tackles the provocative concept of legalising all drugs—an intriguing idea, but unfortunately, the interesting concept was covered and left in the first 1/4.
The pace drags, making it a challenge to get through, and the heavy use of colloquialism and dialect to highlight accents feels unnecessary and distracting. It took all my effort to finish this one instead of DNF

A unique and ambitious look at the roots of celebrity, complex political games, negatively charged careerism, the (failed) war on drugs, and the interplay between media influence and public perception. This is deep stuff. In many ways it works. In others it misses the mark.

The story itself is interesting if minimally inspired: career politician attempts to legalize drugs while a bunch of related things happen in parallel stories. What elevates the story is how well told it is. The semi-chapter, constant flow makes for an easy and pleasurable read. A few of the characters are exceptional; most are stereotypes, though admittedly sometimes of necessity. There are just so many deep topics being addressed that it would take once in a generation writing to land it resoundingly.

Which is why I like High Society - and am an immediate Ben Elton fan. He attempted a near-impossible novel, and made it work better than well enough.

Solid read, I’m excited to read more of his work.

Was very clever and well written. Was super invested in all the characters.

Some time ago, mostly during my university years I read several novels by Ben Elton, so I presume I must have liked his books quite a bit, otherwise I wouldn’t have read so many of them. Anyway, a couple of years passed since then, and now I mostly remember that a Ben Elton novel is an excellent choice when you’re waiting for an exam to start; or when your brain is muddled for some reason and you find it difficult to think clearly; or in any situation when it’s impossible to really pay attention to a book but you must pass the time somehow. By the way, I always suspected that Elton’s novels are disposable, but I wanted to find out for sure if this is really the case, and I had some time on my hands when I wouldn’t have been able to pay attention to a „proper” book anyway, so I went ahead and re-read one of his novels. I chose High Society because I had some vague recollections that I used to consider it as one of Elton’s better efforts.

As it turned out, I was right – Ben Elton is indeed rather amusing in his own frightfully pedantic, spoon-feeding way, and he can weave a plot with wonderful ease (so this is a book I would normally read in one sitting because it’s virtually unputdownable), but the novel is absolutely transparent, with no depths or intricacies, and a second reading offers exactly the same results as the first. (In a way this is okay – I could at least pass some time with the book again.)

So, getting down to High Society then. The protagonist is an unknown backbencher who comes up with the radical idea that all drugs should immediately be legalized in England because everyone is doing them anyway, and if people could get them legally, crime rates would drop by 90% and also, the state would get a lot of tax money. The main plot-line follows the actions and fights of this backbencher who wants to get support for his bill, and with a lot of work, he slowly manages to make the bill popular – but this is not how the story ends.

Besides a whole lot of parliamentary debates and political manoeuvres, there’s a bunch of (awfully instructive and tale-like) other plot-lines where we get acquainted with several characters whose life was ruined by drugs one way or another. For instance, there’s the English chick who tries to smuggle some drugs from Thailand to England for the first time in her life, and gets caught. Then there’s the popular rock singer who destroys his health and career in about two years because he consumes an unbelievable amount of drugs. And then there’s another young girl who runs away from home and ends up being a crack whore within just a couple of days.

I try not to be unnecessarily ironic. Of course my heart’s not made of stone, and I’m aware that dreadful things can happen to human beings because of drug-taking and because of the crime and violence associated with it – but I can’t stand Elton’s preaching and spoon-feeding style without irony. Because Elton’s characters are not really characters, and his stories are not really stories – in his novels, the characters and stories are just illustrations Elton uses in order to make me understand what he thinks is wrong with today’s drug politics and how he would like to change the drug-related legislation in England. (I’m not mixing up Elton and his protagonist – it’s only that I always feel when I read one of his books that his novels are never really about the beliefs of the characters but about the beliefs of Elton himself, which he – for some unknown reason – molds into the shape of a novel.)

And naturally, I understand what Elton says, but I’m not exactly satisfied because I prefer reading about „real” characters in a novel, and not about puppets whose only function is to illustrate some point the author wishes to make. Anyway, I suspect that I get much more easily irritated by didactic-preaching literature nowadays, so considering my current taste in books (which is, of course, subject to change) I would say that Elton’s novels are not only disposable – they are novels you can live without. I’m pretty sure I will live without them in the future.

“High Society” is the excellently titled eighth novel by Ben Elton. A darkly comic tale which takes a look at the use and abuse of recreational drugs in Britain. The major theme throughout the book is that the war on drugs is failing, the criminal element is pervasive, and would the legalisation, licensing, and control of recreational drugs be a viable alternative.

Once more Elton handles quite controversial and sensitive matters with aplomb. His characters are believable and their motives and actions are clear and reasonable.

Following the interconnected stories of three major characters (Peter Paget: a politician, Tommy Hanson: a pop/rock star, and Jessie: a runaway coerced into prostitution) the book taps into several other themes including illegal sex trade and slavery, deception, trust, politics, poverty, homelessness, police corruption, personal identity, and happiness/depression.

This book did, however, take me a long time to get into and I did catch myself thinking “Where the hell is this going?” But I should not have doubted the storytelling skill of Elton. Once the scene had been set the story was compelling.

High Society gets 3.5 lines of Bolivian Marching Powder out of 5.

I read this 16 years ago and I'm still recommending it

Loved it - this author is so good at social commentary. Characters are so well created and altho not like me, very identifiable. I usually hate reading a book that swaps perspectives, but it really flows well here and demonstrates certain points well. If I'd had more free time I'd have read it faster this was a book I was desperate to devour.

A slow starter but a good read once it picked up. Shows an interesting perspective that I'd never considered and it's clear that a lot of thought went into this perspective. Some closure elements are missing such as not getting to know what became of some characters and the continued switching from one character's story to another was a bit distracting at the beginning until the author sort of settled on 3 main characters and at that point things started to flow more easily. Overall a great read