The First Casualty by Ben Elton

Our Rating 4 ⭐s

You Can Buy The First Casualty...here

You Can Find Out More About The Author...here

381 pages

First Published 2005

• The Blurb...

The first casualty when war comes is truth . . .
Flanders, June 1917: a British officer and celebrated poet, is shot dead. ,
He is killed not by German fire, but while recuperating from shell shock well behind the lines. A young English soldier is arrested and, although he protests his innocence, charged with his murder.

Douglas Kingsley is a conscientious objector, previously a detective with the London police, now imprisoned for his beliefs. He is released and sent to France in order to secure a conviction. Forced to conduct his investigations amidst the hell of The Third Battle of Ypres, Kingsley soon discovers that both the evidence and the witnesses he needs are quite literally disappearing into the mud that surrounds him.

Ben Elton's tenth novel is a gut-wrenching historical drama which explores some fundamental questions:
What is murder? What is justice in the face of unimaginable daily slaughter? And where is the honour in saving a man from the gallows if he is only to be returned to die in a suicidal battle?

• Our Review....

I've read a few Ben Elton books and always enjoyed them. I think he is a very underrated writer. Ask Joe Bloggs in the street and he would probably know him as 80s stand up comic, sitcom writer and possibly writer of West End shows. I think of him more as 100% author and a sort of working man's Robert Harris.

A good book will have at least three targets to hit. 1} Setting, 2} Character and 3} Plot. The First Casualty does a bang up job with all three.

1} Setting.  Obviously World War 1. It is self evident that Mr Elton is very knowledgeable in WW1 (see selected quotes.)  No doubt this in part is knowledge gained when he was co writing Black Adder Goes Forth, one of the funniest and most heart-breaking sitcoms ever made. We are immersed in viscous trench raids, the terror of charging directly in machine gun fire in huge frontal assaults, surviving artillery barrages in no-mans land. The mud, blood, rats, shit and lice. But we are also shown the political times as well as the human cost. The rise of the working class unions. The secret shame of hidden homosexuality. in addition to these issues the  suffragettes were changing attitudes of women and to women. We even become aware of the washable, reusable condom. The point being we feel engulfed in 1917. He does this really well.

2} The Characters. These too are well drawn Kinglsey is probably the most nuanced. A police inspector who is in favour of the death penalty but is also a conscientious objector, now that is a very thin line to walk.. He loves his wife who has abandoned him thinking him dead but he is also sexually attracted to nurse Murray. He also loves his job as a an inspector working for the state apparatus but they are the ones manipulating (and destroying?) him. So lots of internal conflict going on here. The other two main characters are a bit more stereotypical nurse Murray is a suffragette. A modern independent woman. She is a fierce ball of energy with her own motorbike and aforementioned condom. Think a working class Queenie from Blackadder 2.  Captain Shannon a sexual predator continually searching for his next adrenaline rush. Confident and brash a sort of darker and more malevolant Captain Flasheart again from the Blackadder TV show.

3) The plot is the final hook from Elton that gets under the skin and drags you into the narrative. Who murdered the secretly gay, poet and war hero? The spurned lover? the left wing barrack room lawyer? the commanding officer? and why? Where Elton is so clever here is taking a well known incident involving a famous person at time and "what iff ing it" i.e. what if x had happened, what if y had done it, and what would the consequences be and so one. The plot is pure speculative fiction and all the better for it

If you read through other Ben Elton novels that I have reviewed on this site, you will have seen that in the past I have been slightly critical of his endings. Not so with this one, he wraps it all up together neatly and leaves the reader with a smile on their lips.

Note to self...in hindsight I should have left this book to read near to Armistice Day.

Good story. Good setting. Good Plot all well delivered equals Good book and a good read.

• Selected Quotes...

"This war is … stupid. It offends my sense of logic. It offends my sense of scale."

"Kingsley was fast learning that within the collective madness that gripped the nation any attempt at rational argument was useless."

"Abercrombie was different now to how he had been at the Lavender Lamp Club. A little louder and a little coarser. He was wearing his mask."

"Kingsley had never defecated in front of anyone before but the men he was travelling with – all experienced soldiers and comrades of old – thought no more about it than if they were pissing up against the same wall."

"A bayonet is a weapon with a worker on both ends.’"

"War is the last stage of the capitalist cycle and as long as we have capitalism we’ll have wars. If you want to get rid of war you’ve got to get rid of capitalism.’"

"only three things lived amongst the trenches: rats, lice and men."

• If You Liked This Then You May Like...

Two Storm Wood by Philip Gray..... our review here

Goodbye To All That by Robert Graves (autobiography)

All Quiet On The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque... our review here