Book Review

Colin Bennett’s novel The Entertainment Bomb: articles, and reviews Collected and edited by George Mensche.

Prime Time is the Right Time

Joe Gatt for G-Spot Magazine

One of the most enduring sci-fi metaphors of state control is George Orwell’s vision of a future in which daily life is dominated by the telescreen. There’s a TV in your flat, and you can’t turn it off, you can’t change channel and, most eerily of all, you can’t hide from it – it watches you constantly. 1984, written at the dawn of TV technology, recognised the importance the new medium would play in 20^th Century politics. But the whole vision of a sinister government is hardly relevant any more. Power is now cloyingly user-friendly. Einstein was perhaps unwittingly closer to the mark when he said “Love is a better master than duty.” The sweet irony now is that You are watching Big Brother.

In The Entertainment Bomb, Colin Bennett takes the notion of user-friendly government to logical absurd conclusion. He interprets all ideologies – political, religious,ect – as advertising systems. When an ideology runs its course, the secret service get their act together and, very much like a Chanel relaunch, they re-advertise Power. Bennett’s protagonist, Dr Hieronymous Fields – is head of Psychological Operations for the British Security Services. He is an unkempt, bumbling figure, very much in the mould of the eccentric British inventor. But instead of test tubes and weird gadgets, Fields’ lab is strewn with the detritus of pop culture: records, magazines, books. His colleagues are “caught in a state of post-communist flux, and plagued by the task of creating new security dimensions for Northern Ireland at an almost-peace.” What Fields comes up with is the ultimate post-serious solution: The Entertainment State, a state governed neither by earnest ideologues nor sombre bureaucrats but by disposable TV personalities. At the grand inauguration of this new State - transmitted to millions of households worldwide, of course – a celebrity fly-past is organised, with pop figures flown on a novelty aircraft. Meanwhile, Nora, a career Day of the Jackal style assassin enraged at this death of seriousness, is poised to shoot it down. Before she has time to do so, however, the plane’s engines malfunction – but the aircraft inexplicably fails to plummet to the ground, as though held aloft by the synergetic karma of its global audience.

Science fiction works best as a caricature of the present, not a prediction of the future. Orwell’s vision was an immensely relevant cautionary tale in the late Forties. The world was still reeling from a war which saw Nazi Germany wage the most chillingly successful media campaign ever- and was about to enter an unprecedented era of Cold War mindgames, propaganda and counter-propaganda. But as a prediction of the actual role political role TV would play, 1984 is quaintly dated. When the recent fad of neighbourhood CCTV got off the ground, there were rumblings in the press of how Orwell’s prediction was finally coming to pass. TV’s role, however, is actually far more subtle than that. When democracy mutated into hyperconsumerism, political ideology found itself competing in the arena it had itself politically sponsored – mass   media. And politicians found themselves having to work increasingly with the new fast-forward language of soundbites and stage management. When some years ago now, John Redwood came forward as a pretender to the Tory throne, what got him laughed off the leadership wasn’t his ideology but the fact that he looked like one of the Vulcans out of Star Trek. In other words he got the references wrong and didn’t work as a telegenic presence. Princess Diana on the other hand, totally obliterated her Windsor opposition with a bravura TV performance –an Oprahtic cocktail of tabloid confessional, staged sincerity and immaculate eye-liner.

As a caricature of the present, The Entertainment Bomb works perfectly. The National Lottery, for instance, would be a text-book example of an Entertainment State at work – a Tax-U-Like generating a feel-good factor and surfeit funding to plug the government’s financial holes. So instead of reluctantly filling in a tax return, you find yourself queueing at Safeways on a Saturday afternoon for a 1-in-14,000,000 chance. Instead of the Chancellor of the Exchequer you get leggy lovely Anthea Turner. Instead of the budget speech you get Mystic Meg.

But Bennett transcends the inherent hilarity of his premise and settles for neither cynicism not conspiracy theories. There’s built-in satire and criticism in his book but he takes his idea to a poetic level, comparing entertainment culture with Aboriginal dream-time, a sort of consensual mythical society.

The Entertainment Bomb is Colin Bennett’s second novel. A the peak of Fringe theatre during the early Eighties, he once had different plays running at The Royal Court, The Bush Theatre, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts at the same time. Fourth Day Like Four Long Months of Absence at the Royal Court was described by the Times critic as “the most technically advanced and ambitious play I have ever seen.” But eventually Bennett turned to the novel form because he felt the medium served his ideas better. The Entertainment Bomb is in fact, very much a novel of ideas a la Huxley.

But what really turned Bennett away from theatre and the publishing establishment – New Futurist Books, his present publishers (Fourth Estate was his first) are a small independent house –is what he sees as the insidious anti-technological snobbery of literary circles. “Literary expression has a problem with the electric age. If it does not come to terms with it, it will die as a form, which would be a terrible thing.” He is bored by the whole scene of what he calls “birthday card novels” in which “Hampstead writers do nothing but question their sexuality.”

Like his protagonist, Fields, Bennett genuinely believes in the mystic power of Fun. “There seems to be that mentality that life is not to be enjoyed. The Sixties were a great blow for freedom in that respect. For the first time in history you could enjoy yourself. In all respects, even music and so on, it was a strong movement against oppressive seriousness. As such, it was the first movement that took an army off the battlefield. And it is the children and grand children of that generation who are still an important force in the world.”

The Entertainment Bomb walks a fine line between a utopian and dystopian vision. Bennett amply captures the ambivalence of the culture of pleasure as both a release and a control mechanism.

The Jewish Chronicle

            And now, away with Seriousness!  Away with religion, political systems, economics, technology, rational thought!  The newest Utopia runs on a single force – Entertainment.

            Stars (performers, not astronomical bodies) replace saints.  Worshipers can revel in affluence and fun.  Trash rules OK.

            Such is “Entertainment Zionism,” the doctrine preached by Dr Hieronymous Fields, eccentric psycho-boffin of British security Services.

His employers seize on the strategic value of his thinking and he emerges from his bunker existence to establish “Entertainment State” in Belfast – where the new peace is very relative.

For his delightfully original explosion of futuristic satire, Colin Bennett assembles a strong team of characters, notably Irish-Catholic  secret agent Nora. 

She is a magnificent creation, a virtuoso of disappearance, disguise and insight, fired by the moral fervour that Entertainment State considers obsolete. 

Her self-appointed mission is to save her own country from subsiding, like Britain, into passionless subservience to television.

The novel is a lively excursion for the intellect.  Idea chases idea, with murder thrown in.

Add a wry, detached narrative tone and an encyclopaedic vocabulary that includes Fields’ own obscure, manufactured jargon – “systems proteins,”  “advertising concentrate,” “High-Kitsch transcendence” – and the result is the literary equivalent of a rich, sometimes too rich, fruit cake, heavily laced with cultural reference, both popular and esoteric.

THE FORTEAN TIMES

Virtualist manifesto slyly disguised as slapstick millennial thriller, this intriguing volume is in itself an entertainment, although one of a seductively subversive nature.  Colin Bennett depicts a world rocked to its philosophic core by the heretic theories of a Bunteresque renaissance blimp, namely one Doctor Hieronymous Fields.  Field’s notion, baldly stated, is that we stand on the brink of something called the Entertainment State, an endless ‘Crinkly Bottom’ manifested in the flesh; a virtual firmament wherein the stars of soap-opera or the Top Ten are the only fixed points that have meaning.  Greeted with enthusiasm by a populace already Baywatch-dazed and adshell-shocked, Fields’s nightmare vision nonetheless conceals a paradisiacal agenda:  a total global re-immersion in the primal mythopeic world of gods and shamanism, to be achieved during the pregnant pauses in Gold Blend commercials.

In the course of this intoxicating romp, Bennett adopts a style that is deceptively off-hand and casual to tackle matters of considerable moment.  Underneath the cunning twists of plot and the admittedly impressive verbal fireworks lies a serious, astute perception of the changing values of reality within a media-massaged world. 

While undoubtedly drawing considerable inspiration from previous pessimistic commentary on thisphrenomenon, such as Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death or Jerry Mander’s equally praiseworthy Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, Bennett has attempted to imagine what the benefits and opportunities of such a world might be.  In doing so, some fundamental notions of what constitutes reality are laid upon the line and some distinctly Fortean analogies are drawn, with both media creations like Shane Ritchie and beasts like the Surrey puma seen as two different strains of “half-real forms”. 

There’s a prankster intellect at work here, and a deadly serious buffoonery that conjures up Wilson and Shea’s discordian  Illuminatus!  Trilogy.  The Entertainment Bomb starts a Scud-like trajectory through the celebrity-haunted aethyrs of what Umberto Eco called hyper-reality, then travels on into the magical and archetypal planes that lie above. 

The world ends, not with a bang or a whimper, but with canned applause.  Check this one out.