Product Description

Stark has more money than God and the social conscience of a dog on a croquet lawn. What's more, they know the Earth is dying, so, deep in Western Australia, a planet-sized plot takes shape. Unfortunately, all that stands in the way of the conspiracy is four inept green freaks.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #422898 in Books
• Published on: 1989-01-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 458 pages

From the Publisher
Ben Elton’s earth-shattering début novel.

From the Back Cover
Stark is a secret consortium with more money than God, and the social conscience of a dog on a croquet lawn. What’s more, it knows the Earth is dying.

Deep in Western Australia where the Aboriginals used to milk the trees, a planet-sized plot is taking shape. Some green freaks pick up the scent: a pommie poseur; a brain-fried Vietnam vet; Aboriginals who have lost their land…not much against a conspiracy that controls society. But EcoAction isn’t in society: it just lives in the same place, along with the cockroaches.

If you’re facing the richest and most disgusting scheme in history, you have to do more than stick up two fingers and say ‘peace’.

About the Author
As host of SATURDAY LIVE and FRIDAY NIGHT LIVE Ben Elton proved himself a popular and controversial comedian. As well as his own stand-up routines Ben's numerous screenwriting credits include THE YOUNG ONES, FILTHY RICH AND CATFLAP and the award-winning BLACKADDER. His latest books are INCONCEIVABLE and BLAST FROM THE PAST.

Customer Reviews

Ben Elton at his hilarious best.
This book is possible the finest of Ben Elton's creations. The plot hangs around a corporate conspiracy known as 'Stark', the characters do not fulfil the the cliqued romantic ideals which is all to common in modern novels. Any reader can closely identify with the characters, and therefore can be embraced by the humour in it. It confirms the fact that recognition comedy, in which the reader can feel an empathy with the characters is the best kind of comedy. Everybody knows a 'C.D' or a 'Sly Moorcock', and it is good to have a bloody good laugh at their expense. The centre of the novel is ecological concern, it is written with a clear deveotion to the cause and despite the book principally being a comedy the passion and charm it is written with makes it an extremely moving book. The above factors are added to by virtue of Adrian Edmonsons exceptionally expressive voice brings the text to life. After listening to Stark, you will never be complacent about the environment again.

This is how the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper...
I don't think I've ever read a novel that improved so much as I read. From a slow beginning focusing on the less-than-compelling character of CD (obviously Elton's alter ego), more and more wonderful characters were introduced and the plot became surpisingly involving, till I was sorry to see my train pull in because it meant I would have to close the book. Waits for the bus became unnoticeable because I was so absorbed in what would happen next. Towards the end I literally couldn't put it down. I truly didn't expect the Stark Conspiracy to take the turn it did and it frightened me reading about the ecological destruction that seems inevitable if the facts Elton cited are true. I find myself in the position of many of the characters, just feeling helpless and hoping that "they" will find a way to fix it. I knew Elton was funny from watching Young Ones and Blackadder but I didn't expect such strong sense of storytelling and a bleak outlook from him. He creates many fine characterizations; most memorable are the burnt out Vietnam vet Zimmerman, his hippie buddy Walter (you'll recognize shades of Neil from the Young Ones in this guy), the uber-sarcastic Mrs. Culboon, rich car-phone fanatic Aristos Tyron, the exceedingly evil Professor Durf, and especially Stark Conspirator Sly Moorcock, who becomes the novel's most tragic figure. "Stark" also has a couple of strong heroines in Rachel and Chrissie. Now if Elton had just done something about that CD...

SATIRE SLAPSTICK AND DOOMSDAY
Ben Elton is probably best known as scriptwriter for the Blackadder series, and that will give you a fair idea of both his talent and his way of thinking. To get the most out of Stark it probably helps to have followed the stand-up comic series he used to do on the BBC. That was brilliant and no two ways about it, provided you didn't find some of the topics embarrassing, which, in the absence of any maiden aunts, I didn't. No topic was off-limits. There was a great deal about certain parts of the body, but we were long used to that from Billy Connolly. Where Ben Elton went further was in dealing with political and racial, and particularly with environmental, issues. He used to deliver his monologues at machine-gun speed, and I was impressed not only by the sheer physical stamina he must have needed but also by what was either a phenomenal memory or a genius for on-the-spot improvisation, or maybe both. He went in for gag-lines in a way Billy Connolly doesn't, but one talent they have in common is for seeing the ridiculous side of quite ordinary things. There was always a general theme each time, environmental as often as not, but a few dozen incidental targets also used to get shot at along the way.

Read Stark with that in mind. I like the potshot he takes at champagne - the name trademarked so as to keep the price artificially high. However I remembered with pleasure the way we the public called the champagne producers' bluff at the millennium by boycotting the stuff so that we could find some high-quality surplus being sold off at bargain prices quite some time later. This thought brought me some comfort in reading Stark - perhaps we are not totally in the hands of the tycoons. Other details were entirely incidental and unrelated to the general message of the book, but he is the first person I have ever known to call attention to a strange deaths-head kind of face that has long repelled me in some famous American women anxious to preserve their looks beyond a certain age.

The thread of the book is serious in more senses than one. It is about the threat to the environment, and just exactly how bad that is I don't think anyone is quite sure. Ben Elton goes completely over the top, and that was smart. I don't suppose that even he takes at face value his scenario of the asset-stripper co-opted into the exclusive club of monstrous tycoons - a tobacco-baron, an arms exporter, a fast-food king foisting his stringburgers and gristlefurters on a complaisant public and other usual suspects - whose purpose is literally to bring about environmental disaster in the full knowledge of what they are doing. By caricaturing the suspects in this way he avoids being overtly political, and by going to extremes in his disaster-scenario he keeps the story vivid and involving, but just a story (I hope) all the same. For good measure he throws in a couple of unrelated nuclear catastrophes and the wreck of a maritime cargo of toxic waste. Such is the power of the money involved that people manage to stay unaware of what is going on (governments hardly get a mention), and the only resistance comes from a picaresque assortment of well-meaning liberals, hippies, dropouts and aborigines. One of these is a devotee of Judge Dread comics, and I wonder whether Ben got some of his ideas from such sources himself.

The story moves fast and the characters are interesting, although the book would hardly challenge Evelyn Waugh or Julian Barnes for Fine Writing. I found it helped to keep in mind my image of Ben Elton on stage, and I could hear his voice quite clearly - he writes much of it the way he talks. I find it hard to blame the politicians or even the tycoons in real life beyond a certain extent. If we are being suckered that is mainly our own fault, it seems to me, and we are, it seems to me, and it is, it seems to me. The planet's resources are not a bottomless pit, it will not take more than a certain amount of abuse just as our own bodies will not, we have not yet seen certain disasters as they could be (e.g. a nuclear meltdown, of which Chernobyl was a mere mooncast shadow), and of course mother nature herself could take a hand with, say, meteor-strikes, earthquakes, super-volcanoes etc. Probably nobody quite knows the extent of the chances we're taking, but it seems to me that we need to wake up and to grow up in the way we're behaving. We were given our brains to use, and we should remember the parable of the talents.