Ben Elton – The First Casualty

Posted on | January 7, 2009 | Comments Off

The nice cover

Ben Elton gets up to a lot. As well as writing books he’s also an actor, comedian and director, and recently wrote a musical. I picked up The First Casualty not as a result of his pedigree in any of these things. I picked it up because I was bored.

The book opens in a trench amidst the carnage of Ypres, where all flesh is grass, and sets the scene for the outplaying of the novel with the death of a soldier who is unceremoniously drowned in the mud. The book doesn’t do this to make a point of the horrors of war, to depict how callously lives were discarded for the sake of petty pride and 5 yards of worthless mud, but to get down to the business of a good, interesting novel, with adequate doses of suspense, intruige, romance, and everything else a railway station paperback needs. That’s the purpose of this book through and through- and it succeeds. It’s easy to read, it maintains your attention and would happily get you through a train journey or a wait at an airport. Once you’re done it will also prop up a book shelf, mop up coffee, or anything else you’d want from a five quid thriller.

This isn’t a book to keep on your shelves to remind you of the revelations it brought, or to make you look less stupid when the neighbours come round. It’s just an enjoyable read, and that’s why I liked it. End of the matter.

Or is it?

The thing with all literature is that it makes you think. In some way, every book has to- it makes you empathise with characters and consider viewpoints, or educates you of history, culture or geography by neccessity of its context. Elton’s novel is sufficiently well researched, and has sufficient subtlety to make you consider what the Great War was really like. It does this purely to set a good story- but by accident- and only if you wish it- it brings up all the questions of the British class system, the role of the wars in changing gender roles, the transition from empire building to empire buying, and the ethics of war.

Elton’s doesn’t have his protagonist arrested as a conscientious objector to proove some mighty point- rather to serve the plot. But the virtue of literature is there is the chance to ask these questions. The love interest isn’t a feminist on the edge of the line to proove some point about gender roles- those questions are ripe for the picking but never enforced on the reader.

I enjoyed this book twice- once reading it as a distraction and a good way to while away the East coast mainline. And a second time when I stopped to consider, and discuss, the nature of our society, class and gender as affected by the war- in my own time.