The Sirens of Titan

I recently looked back through all of my blog posts, and something occurred to me - am I too lenient with my ratings? It is extremely rare that I give a book less than 3.5 out of 5, with quite a lot scoring 4.5 or 5. But then thinking about it some more, I decided that it's more a result of the calibre of book I choose - I go out of my way to find works that are already considered to be worthy of praise, and it isn't often that I find reason to disagree. And yet, every now and then, I come across a book so ludicrously good it causes me to reevaluate any and all existing benchmarks I have created for myself.

Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan is one such book. Published in 1959, his second work is generally considered his first great novel, following the patchy Player Piano. And I have to admit that I chose it mostly based on its impressive Amazon rating. But that's as good a reason as any, and I quickly found that, once again, I felt compelled to agree with popular opinion.

The Sirens of Titan really is Vonnegut at his best - already a high bar to meet. It traces the fortunes of one Malachi Constant, the son of a billionaire Wall Street trader who made his money based on luck alone, after he is invited to the home of a reclusive aristocrat who appears every few weeks before disappearing into thin air after a few minutes. The aristocrat, Winston Niles Rumfoord (Vonnegut does have a talent for memorable names), famous for having been the first man to set out into space for the purpose of exploration alone, explains to Malachi that his appearances are a result of his having flown into a "chrono-synclastic infundibulum" near Mars, something similar to a black hole that has strung out his (and his dog's) existence across the Solar System and through all time. As a result he can see everything that has been and that will be, and informs Malachi that he will travel to Mars, where he will have a child with Rumfoord's wife, then to Mercury, then back to Earth and finally to Saturn's moon Titan, where Rumfoord himself has been primarily based since his accident, in the company of his alien friend Salo.

There follows a series of adventures whereby Malachi does his utmost to avoid all of these events but finds himself involved in them anyway. He makes a point of not going to Mars by refusing to go near the only active rocket in the world, but ends up being kidnapped by aliens and taken there anyway to serve in Mars's army - and the same goes for Rumfoord's wife Beatrice, who does indeed end up giving birth to Malachi's child en route. He believes travelling to Mercury to be an impossibility as the Martian army prepares to invade Earth, but his ship has been reprogrammed by Rumfoord - head of the army - to take him there regardless. A good thing too, as the invasion fails spectacularly and nearly everyone is killed. He is then recalled to Earth to act as the messiah figure of Rumfoord's new religion, created to unite humanity following the first conflict in which the world truly united against a common enemy. So Rumfoord was pulling the strings all along. But here comes the twist - as he sends Malachi, Beatrice and their son Chrono on their way to live out the rest of their days on Titan, it transpires that Rumfoord himself - and the rest of the human race - were merely part of an extremely elaborate plan to deliver a replacement part for Salo's broken-down spaceship.

The Sirens of Titan is just an ingeniously written book. Its style is as simple as it gets - sentences, paragraphs and even chapters condensed down to be as short as possible, and yet conveying so much with so little. Roald Dahl would be a good comparison, and that's not intended as a criticism of either writer. The tone ranges from hauntingly poetic to bluntly ironic, and there are laughs to be had as well. Which is good because we're dealing with some pretty heavy subject matter here - ideas of predestination, free will, what it means to be human and the importance of humanity. Vonnegut wraps all of this up into a level of prose that could be read by a child, and yet a child reader would miss a lot. In fact, I'm sure I did as well - it's one of those books where the ending realigns everything you thought you knew leading up to it.

A brilliant reminder of the power of the written word in the right hands, and a book that demands another read. It's not quite as good as Slaughterhouse Five, but that's in my top three books of all time - and this really isn't far off.

5/5, and well deserved.

When it comes to doing a lot with a little, it doesn't get much better than these fellow mid-western minimalists:

This Perfect Day

Over the years, I've read plenty of things by writers considered among the greatest ever. Shakespeare, Goethe, Camus - even if I enjoyed their work to varying degrees, I could nearly always see why they earned as much acclaim as they now hold. And then there's Ira Levin, the greatest writer I'd never heard of. In Rosemary's Baby, The Stepford Wives and The Boys from Brazil, Levin was responsible for some pretty iconic works of 20th-Century fiction. And in This Perfect Day, he created one of the most puzzlingly overlooked.

Perhaps it was down to the fact that, by 1970, readers felt that the dystopian novel had already been perfected. Certainly, This Perfect Day veers dangerously close to the likes of Brave New World, with its society of genetically faultless drones, and 1984, with its all-seeing surveillance state. But these comparisons do it a disservice, as Levin manages to create a world just as prophetic as the cornerstones of the genre, and almost as inventive.

This Perfect Day pulls the classic trick of setting up a world that appears utopian, before gradually revealing details that help you realise it's actually the exact opposite. The world's society - or "family" as they call themselves - have been united for generations, increasingly genetically homogeneous and provided with regular "treatments" of drugs that keep them free of any disease, but also passive and satisfied with their existence. "Hate" and "fight" have become the dirtiest words imaginable, jobs are guaranteed and assigned to everyone, and the likes of homelessness and famine have been eradicated. All of this thanks to Unicomp - a vast supercomputer beneath a mountain in Switzerland that keeps track of each individual and decides the turns their lives will take on their behalf. But our hero, Li RM35M4419 - Unicomp assigns names too, from a choice of four per gender, but Li prefers to go by the nickname Chip - is a bit different. With one green and one brown eye, he's marked out as physically different from everyone else at birth, and it's not long before his behaviour starts to cause concern too. Chip shows a tendency for creativity; despite being pushed down the career path of a geneticist, his real passion lies in designing buildings, and he's interested in art as well - both pursuits rendered irrelevant by Unicomp.

This earns him the attention of a group of fellow subversives, who meet in secret to partake in activities usually banned - by tricking medical workers into reducing the dosage of his treatments, Chip is able to better appreciate the pleasures of smoking, drinking and reading for enjoyment. He also begins to see the problems with some of Unicomp's decisions - the fact that despite the lack of disease, everyone dies aged 62, and how, free of his chemical suppressants, he is capable of feeling aroused more than once a week. He also starts to wonder if there are groups completely outside society, living as people did in the days before Unicomp. In fact, there are - living on a few remote islands dotted around the world. Chip eventually escapes to one of these colonies, based on Mallorca, and starts to put together a team to destroy Unicomp once and for all. But it's once Chip and his gang make it to Switzerland and into the heart of the mountain that the book's real twist is revealed - the true nature of the islands and the real reason Chip was marked out as different, leading to a satisfying conclusion with plenty of explosions, subterfuge, and a surprisingly happy ending that neatly ties up an overall very well-developed plot.

And it's this plot that helps elevate This Perfect Day to the level of its predecessors; it's a plot-driven book, with Levin's socio-political commentary merely bubbling away in the background. The way he manages this is quite brilliant, dropping in hints and fleshing out the world where necessary, leaving the reader with a full picture by the end. It's a believable one too, a world where all possible data on everyone is stored by a faceless computer, and freedoms are gradually limited for the greater good - without people having been asked whether they actually want that. As Chip comes to learn, being free from all suffering is not the same as being free, and it's the two sides of that complex debate that This Perfect Day nudges us to consider.

This Perfect Day deserves to be mentioned in the same sentence as the greats of 20th-Century dystopian fiction, not least because it does a much better job of being actual fiction than so many comparable works.

4.5/5

Couldn't think of anything beyond this.

Good as Gold

As I have already established on this blog, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 is my favourite book of all time, and while I have read a lot of very good books since, nothing really comes close, for me, to its staggering complexity, profundity, humour and pathos. So it's only natural that I should eventually get round to reading some of Heller's other books, to see if he could do it again. Closing Time, the sequel to Catch-22, was a good attempt: almost on par in terms of its brilliant dialogue and lampooning of American politics, but let down by a lot of rather bland passages relating to the working-class Jewish community of Coney Island. Good as Gold is Heller's other well-known book, considered by many to be his second-best. It also focuses a lot on the working-class Jewish community of Coney Island, so I wasn't quite sure what to expect going in.

Actually, I was pleasantly surprised. It's no Catch-22 - what is? - but it also mostly avoids the mundanity of the least interesting parts of Closing Time. Good as Gold follows the misadventures of a man, Bruce Gold, trying to find his place in a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, increasingly post-segregation America. He doesn't find it easy: working as an academic and occasionally publishing books and articles, he is shunned by his family who, while proud of his achievements, seem to think that he thinks that he's above them. But he's also shunned by members of the elite circle of society he has been forever trying to break into who, whether openly or not, always think of him as beneath them.

As the novel opens, Gold is stuck trying to get a book about "the Jewish experience in America" off the ground. The trouble is, despite having lived it, he can't seem to decide what that experience actually is, nor will anyone provide him with a clear answer. It is during this period of writer's block that he ends up churning out a shorter article of questionable merit and content, which of course ends up making him famous - not that anyone bothers to read it. It's here that Good as Gold really gets going, as Gold is invited to Washington where a high-ranking government position may be waiting for him. It turns out that the president is a big fan of a review Gold had written of the president's autobiography, and enjoys reading said review when people around him are talking about "agriculture, housing, money, starvation, health, education, and welfare, and other matters in which he has no interest" - like in Closing Time, the satire here is just far too on the mark. Anyway, the scenes in Washington are as close as Good as Gold gets to Heller's truly best writing, introducing a succession of increasingly outlandish and memorable characters, all with some darkly comedic analogy to convey, and all of whom, directly or indirectly, want to remind Gold of his place as a Jew.

Because, no matter how much he may try to escape the fact, Gold's story always endeavours to remind him of his origins. A verbally abusive father, a mocking brother, five bickering sisters and their assorted partners, a stepmother who gets madder by the day and a wife who just doesn't seem to care any more are omnipresent throughout the book, whether in the foreground or in the back of Gold's anxious, overthinking mind. There are his childhood companions too, all of whom are less educated and talented than him, and all of whom have been a lot more successful in life. So while Gold does his best to break the cycle - attempting to elope with the daughter of a billionaire, penetrate the very highest level of government, and move in those elite circles that have never accepted him - he finds himself drawn back to his old Coney Island neighbourhood, and a succession of excruciating dinners and parties with his family, in rooms where everyone hates each other but is too proud to say so directly. I can't pretend to understand the American Jewish experience, but I suspect that this is what Heller is trying to convey with these plot lines, and he does it well.

Good as Gold isn't without its flaws: some of the prose drifts far enough into abstraction as to be unclear, Heller misses the chance to fully develop his satirisation of academia, and there's a whole section dedicated to how terrible Henry Kissinger was which, while it makes a lot of valid points, just feels out of place. But all in all there's a lot to like: the ludicrously eccentric billionaire Pugh Biddle Conover, who has forgotten everything but how to be racist but still comes through for Gold in the end, Gold's contact in Washington Ralph, who reels off one-liners with practically every line, the description of Gold's fitness regime that destroys his body but leaves him feeling in peak condition... and most of all the relentlessly brilliant dialogue, conversation after conversation of tragically funny misunderstanding between people that reflect the frustrations of life so well.

Good as Gold is a bloated, confusing mess - and that's what makes it so good.

5/5

There's a lot of discussion here about whether any Jews had truly been successful in America. The field of music is noticeably absent from that discussion.

Monday Starts on Saturday

There's one thing I've learned for sure in the past couple of years - Soviet science fiction writers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky had a true talent for naming their books. Roadside Picnic, Hard to be a God, The Snail on the Slope: every one of them is memorable and intriguing, drawing you in to experience the usually excellent stories that follow. Monday Starts on Saturday is no exception, and it goes further than just being a neat phrase; encapsulating each of the separate parts of what turned out to be my favourite Strugatsky novel to date, and probably one of my top five books of all time.

Monday Starts on Saturday is written in triptych form, three loosely connected and bizarre stories that represent the brothers' most inventive and entertaining writing. As the novel opens, our hero Alexander Privalov is on his way across Russia to visit some friends. He never gets there. After picking up some mysterious but friendly hitchhikers he finds himself staying in a town that becomes increasingly impossible to leave - a situation that feels distinctly Kafkaesque at first but quickly dives further into absurdism. This establishes the world and, such as they are, rules of the book, a world where nothing is certain and Monday could indeed start on Saturday, with Alexander repeatedly finding himself transported about in the house of the old woman who takes him in with no knowledge of his movements and being kept awake at night by the fact that the house grows legs and walks around... the woman apparently being the living embodiment of the legendary Baba Yaga figure of Russian folklore. Things only get more weird from there as he meets a talking fish who is annoyed that she seems destined to live forever - the first of many genuinely funny passages - and is plagued by a coin that always seems to return to him after he spends it.

His possession of the coin eventually gets him in trouble with the local authorities, and this leads into the second story, where the novel properly comes into its own. The local authorities, it turns out, work for NITWITT - the National Institute for the Technology of Witchcraft and Thaumaturgy - and Privalov, a computer programmer by training, is offered a job there. There follows a relentless bombardment of satire, one-liners and dissection of myths and legends from around the world. The characters come thick and fast, each more outlandish than the last: from the government officials who attempt to control the institute with no scientific training of their own, to the researchers applying the scientific method to magical pursuits such as alchemy and the search for eternal life. England's own Merlin gets a look in, portrayed as a droning old nerd who spends his time predicting the weather - partly by magic, mostly by listening to forecasts on the radio. I'm sure there's a lot that I missed here: parodies and caricatures of Soviet state figures and the bureaucracy they were so fond of that will probably only be appreciated by those who lived in the country in the 1970s. But it matters little, because the humour does find a wider audience, in its gentle and ultimately admiring lampooning of the world of academia and the people who devote their lives to increasingly obscure studies. Or those who game the system to earn themselves fame and fortune, like Alexander's uncultured colleague Vybegallo, whose experiments, while wholly unscientific, never fail to draw media interest. As for the concept of Monday starting on Saturday here, it applies to the scientists' work ethic - Alexander is left in charge of the institute on New Year's Eve, expecting the place to be deserted, but instead it's busier than ever as his colleagues flock back from their parties to do what they truly enjoy - working and researching. The Strugatskys even do a great job capturing that kind of friendship of shared professional experience that you can only feel with close co-workers.

The third story carries on at the institute, and is more straightforward science fiction, as Alexander and some of his new friends try to solve the mystery of how their director seems to be two separate people, but still only one, and how his (their?) pet parrot seems to have come back to life. The solution again plays on the concept inspired by the book's absurd title, and proves a genuine mind-bender. This section also offers up a gently mocking critique of sci-fi literature, Privalov volunteering as a test subject and finding himself transported into a future generated literally from the predictions of the genre; he finds it by turns boringly detailed and frustratingly slow.

It all sounds quite highbrow, but Monday Starts on Saturday never gets too heavy - at the end of the day it's a book about wizards and talking animals and people who can fly and walk through walls without thinking about it. And there's room for the likes of vampires, gnomes, demons and unicorns - all reappropriated into a professional or scientific context for comedic effect. I know I've gone on about the humour, but it honestly is one of the funniest books I've read, on par with the best - Catch-22, Slaughterhouse Five, Infinite Jest - in its twists and turns of language. A spectacular effort that I'm sure I'll read many more times over the course of my life.

5/5

Science!

Kill 'Em All

The John Niven mini-festival comes to an end with his 2017 novel Kill 'Em All, the third and, I suspect, last to feature his appallingly brilliant creation Steven Stelfox. Following on from events in Kill Your Friends and The Second Coming, Stelfox has achieved pretty much all that there is to achieve in the music industry, having made hundreds of millions as the face of the TV talent show that drove the plot of The Second Coming and now semi-retired, working occasional missions as an industry consultant and problem solver. But he's still not quite satisfied - for all the luxury and debauchery that his life entitles him to, there's always someone out there with a bigger yacht...

Kill 'Em All is billed as the sequel to Kill Your Friends, but differs significantly in its narrative technique and focus. While Niven's debut read more like an interior-monologue rant about everything Stelfox perceived to be wrong with the world, Kill 'Em All jumps from character to character, switching up its prose style in the process. As such, Steven isn't granted quite as much free rein to attack - although since his scorn is mostly directed at people worse off than him, and since that's now basically everyone, that may not be a bad thing. Instead, we're given a much more plot-driven book, following the tribulations of Lucius Du Pre, once the world's biggest pop star but now broke, reclusive and hopelessly addicted to prescription medication. Any similarities to real persons living or dead are of course purely coincidental, but he lives in a mansion complex called Narnia, has had repeated surgeries to change his skin colour and spends his ample free time hosting "sleepovers" for pre-teen boys, so you can draw your own conclusions as to who the inspiration may have been. Anyway, Lucius' reckless spending habits have left his record label in debt, and he's in no state to enter the comeback tour that might help earn something back. On top of that, the parents of one of his young companions have managed to acquire some pretty damning video evidence against him, which needs to be made to disappear - just think of the shareholders.

Head of Du Pre's label is James Trellick, who appeared in Kill Your Friends as Steven's lawyer co-worker and the closest thing he had to an actual friend, and so Steven is called in to sort things out. From there the plot spirals outwards in an increasingly ridiculous manner, taking in blackmail upon blackmail, a palace in the desert, conspiracy theories and perhaps the most over-powered professional hitman ever committed to paper. It's just all a bit silly and overblown, the action sequences in particular border on laughable, and Niven ultimately has to give up trying to resolve things in a catastrophically weak ending that manages to be both predictable and disappointing. Unlikable characters abound, none of whom quite manage to tip over into Stelfox's territory of subversive admirability.

All serious issues with the book, and they keep it from being anything like as good as Kill Your Friends in my eyes. Yet there's just something about Niven's writing that kept me crawling back for more - all of which, really, can be found in those interior monologue passages where Stelfox lays waste to everything and everyone. And while Kill Your Friends was a nice reminder of a moment in time at the end of the last century, Kill 'Em All is a relentless, brutal dissection of the world we live in now. From Trump to Brexit, ISIS to insider trading, nothing is safe from Niven's satirical barbs, a cascade of one-liners leaving the reader in tears of laughter and then tears of despair. Because Stelfox loves it all - after all, it's all making him even richer - but for the rest of us it's just another reminder that the gap - any gap you would care to name - is growing. You can call Niven cynical, but there's no denying that he's uncomfortably right about a lot of things.

So as weak as the plot of Kill 'Em All might be, it actually works better if you don't read it as a story at all. If Niven were to delve into non-fiction writing, that is certainly where I'd head next with his work.

4/5

The book's title is a reference to Metallica's debut album, and this has to be the most appropriate track from it:

The Second Coming

Having enjoyed Kill Your Friends, I continued on the John Niven trail, purchasing another two of his novels. First up was The Second Coming, published in 2011 and serving as a kind of bridge to Kill 'Em All, the sequel to Kill Your Friends. It mirrors Kill Your Friends' satirical take on modern society, but turns its eye particularly to religion, earning it a good deal more controversy and detractors - although not always for the right reasons.

The premise is straightforward enough - having created the world and everything in it, God keeps an eye on things up until the Renaissance and decides that mankind is doing well enough that He can afford a week's holiday. Returning from His fishing trip - which takes more like 300 years in Earth time - He's dismayed to see the state of the world, with all its wars, pollution, inequality and injustice. And worst of all are all the Christians - none of whom seem to be following His original, single ideal any more: "be nice". So He decides it's time to send His son and messenger back down to Earth for a bit to try and spread the word and just get people to be nicer to each other.

Enter Jesus, the book's main character, who hasn't been up to much since his last trip down here - and he's reluctant to return, after the treatment he got. But eventually he agrees to give it a try, and after being implanted into a virgin in rural America (God likes to do things by the book) he grows up to be a down-and-out musician in New York, helping recovering addicts and the homeless. But he feels that he needs a bigger platform to get his message out there, and by chance - or was it meant to be? - he sees that entering a TV talent show could be the key. It was at this point - having torn through the first third of the book, laughing out loud at regular intervals at its wittiness and inventiveness in depicting heaven and hell - that The Second Coming lost its way a bit for me. Because before the contest itself, we're forced to sit through a road trip across The States, meant to serve as character development for Jesus and his disciples but ultimately failing because none of them, save Jesus himself, had much character to develop in the first place. There's his bandmates Kris and Morgan, respectively the angel and demon on his shoulder, recovering addict Becky who I believe represents the Mary Magdalene figure, Vietnam veteran Bob whose vocabulary has been reduced to a single word thanks to PTSD: there's nothing particularly original to be found, and their trip drags on without really adding anything.

Anyway, I bought this book with the promise of more Steven Stelfox, and fortunately he swoops in around the halfway point to salvage things. He's moved on a lot since the events of Kill Your Friends, now working in LA as the brains behind, and face of, American Pop Star - having become a very thinly-veiled caricature of Simon Cowell and doing very well at it. This leads to some of the more memorable passages as Jesus and Steven clash over Jesus's musical direction (Jesus favours organic indie music, Stelfox knows that that won't sell many records) and the general public start to consider that maybe this scruffy-looking chap claiming to be the legitimate son of God isn't as mad as he first seems. It probably says a lot about me that I liked Steven much more as a character than Jesus - or maybe it's just down to how Niven writes him in such a cleverly multifaceted way, creating a man who is, in theory, pure evil but who you can't help but respect just a little bit. Certainly, I felt as though, were Stelfox to come face to face with the Devil as depicted in this book, he'd stand a pretty good chance of talking his way out of hell.

And so Jesus gets his moment in the spotlight, and it's all he needs to gain a legitimate following, whereupon he moves to Texas to set up a commune. And so I started to lose my enthusiasm for the novel again, somehow caring less about the attempts of local religious figures and then the government to sabotage the potential utopia that Jesus is trying to create, the satirical points that Niven is making here feeling just a bit too obvious and unoriginal. He saves things again with the conclusion and an ending that was actually a lot less cynical than I was expecting, but the ultimate result is a flawed book that I felt missed a lot of potential. And that's without getting into the issues I had with its timeline - it's made clear that God has the power to play around with that kind of thing, but still - and Niven's use of language. I've never had an issue with profanity in a book before but it's so overdone and overused here that it does detract from the prose a lot.

The Second Coming does a lot right, and makes a lot of good points, but there are just a few too many issues for it to be a truly great book. That being said, the world would benefit a lot if everyone would follow Jesus's advice and "be nice" more often.

3/5

Jesus's audition song, and not a bad choice at all.

Kill Your Friends

The variety goes on. This time I jumped to a book that was different even by my standards - the 2008 debut by Scottish author John Niven, Kill Your Friends. The novel caused quite a stir on release due to its graphic depictions of the music industry in the 1990s and its study of power and obsession - and I was pleased to find that its reputation was well deserved.

As the novel opens, it seems that our 27-year-old protagonist Steven Stelfox - one of those characters you should by rights hate, thanks to his casual, ingrained sexism, racism and bloody-minded attitude, but at the same time end up loving due to his charm, ability to rattle off memorable one liners and ultimately admirable ambition - is pretty on top of things. He has a hugely overpaid job developing artists for a record label, an office to himself and a nice pad in Notting Hill. But Steven wants more - he won't be happy, in fact, until he reaches the very top of his game. And he knows that to do so will involve driving all of his rivals out. Kill Your Friends details Steven's journey through 1997 as he goes to ever more extreme lengths to make sure this happens - even extortion and murder aren't off the cards.

Look up basically any review of this book and the writer will quickly turn to comparisons with Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho. And this review is no exception, because the similarities are obvious - the protagonist's internal monologue throwing an aggressive eye over his surroundings, the business meetings where everyone acts nice but are really out to destroy each other, and the prevailing satirical commentary on how we have created a society where psychopathy is just about the only way to make it to the top. But Niven does approach it all from a much more British - or perhaps English - angle: his character's seething disdain for the working class, for example, coming more from a point of institutionalised elitism rather than capitalist insularity. Likewise the violence is dialled down hugely in comparison: while American Psycho positively revels in it, Kill Your Friends drops in just a couple of scenes where necessary, just to remind us not to get too attracted to Stelfox's life choices.

And while we're talking about Brett Easton Ellis, I personally found a lot of parallels with his other famous work, Less Than Zero. Because Steven Stelfox ultimately sits somewhere between Patrick Bateman and Clay - while on the outside he may be a confident, ruthless young man, he freely admits that he's never really in control of his career or life, it only taking one bad signing or risky decision gone bad to end a career. And then there's the endless whirl of drink, drugs and partying that can only ever take its toll on a young mind, becoming less and less fun yet somehow more and more necessary and, just like in Less Than Zero, leading nowhere good for the purposeless young people who choose this lifestyle. Most sobering of all is that Steven actually does manage to break out of this cycle, realising that to rest on your laurels is to admit defeat and taking his plotting to the next level.

It all sounds very dark. But Kill Your Friends, on balance, is more of a comedy - albeit a very black and satirical one. It's an irreverent look at British society and culture, and a reminder of just how odd things were back then - we elected a Labour Prime Minister who spent millions on travel and entertainment in his first year in office while simultaneously cutting social benefits (a strategy that makes him a "top lad" in Steven's book), experienced a very un-British public outpouring of emotion following the death of Princess Diana, the two biggest songs of the year were a twenty-five year old Elton John track and the Teletubbies theme tune, Radiohead came out with an album that everyone hated but is now considered one of the best of all time, and Oasis came out with an album that everyone loved but is now considered pretty poor. And the final message is clear enough - deep down, all we really want is to make a bit of cash.

Kill Your Friends got me into Niven in a big way - enough to acquire its sequel and another of his novels, which will be the next two things I read.

4.5/5

And for the record, Be Here Now is nowhere near as bad as people say it is.