Identity Crisis

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Enjoyable commentary on contemporary society and its over the top political correctness, and the ‘me’ generation with their social media obsession. I picked this up because Audible pushed it as a recommendation and because I fancied a break from fantasy. At least, that's how it starts, and I was perfectly ready to toss the book aside because the implication seemed to be that it was okay to victim-blame as long as your heart was in the right place or something like that. This book is hilarious, sad in parts, and terrifying as it is so easy to see the truth in the humour. Honestly, I think he is right on the money and that we are already here, meshed in this web of lies, lies that are told to us because we will believe them so readily as they tap in to our innermost ideals - ideals we are maybe embarrassed about admitting in day to day life but the internet knows us, it allows us to express them and if Bot A agrees with us then we are validated.

I wonder what the discussions behind the scenes were like, because this book feels a little compromised. This has left me to wonder, and quite frankly, worry for my younger kids who will soon be introduced to this world of culture wars and social media (with their dysfunction, manufactured and manipulated outrage, etc. The singular murder of Sammy leads Mike to the realization that the world has literally left him behind in ways he can not fully comprehend and reveals how ‘unwoke’ he is or is perceived to be. Walter has cleverly created superficially likeable protagonists in a dual narrative style whilst hinting enough that you inherently know you can’t trust them. The world has changed around him and he simply hasn't kept up with it which plunges him like a tragic hero from one awkward situation to another.The parts of the story that wasn’t too much to my taste was around the ‘Love Island’ reality TV show.

The opening tells us that four people were at dinner and one is murdered – the rest of the book flits back and forth between the past and the present as we discover how and why this happened. Lost in a blizzard of hashtags, his already complex investigation is further impeded by the fact that he simply doesn’t ‘get’ a single thing about anything anymore. Other people who are involved in culture-war issues also keep turning up murdered or having committed suicide, including a TERF, a prominent feminist historian spearheading a terribly silly campaign to retrospectively prosecute Samuel Pepys for sexual abuse, the sexual predator actor she worked with, a couple of Christian hotel owners who turned away a gay couple, a far-right incel, a Black girl on a council estate, and a straight couple on a queer edition of Love Island.This satire of identity politics and media manipulation must be effective because readers on both the left and right think it’s unfair to them. Set a little in the future, Detective Mick Matlock investigates a series of murders whilst trying to tiptoe safely around an ever-changing identity landscape, which he just doesn’t understand. The book's less terrible than it would be if Elton was a full-on reactionary, but it's probably more boring. That's why the plot all falls apart at the end; there's not a strong enough ideological framework behind it to carry it through to a powerful finish.

Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. In this first book of the tale, Rothfuss leads us towards something huge in Kvothe’s biography that’s somehow affected life for everyone – when the book ends, we still have to wait to discover what. This gives him a remarkable amount of wriggle room to explore topics, by weaving in and out of the facts like dodgems. I don't think there are too many groups who Ben has missed out on insulting/praising here, depending on which particular fence you're sitting on today. It may upset some, I'd be surprised if it didn't, but I'm more than happy to say I very much enjoyed it from start to finish!In addition to the overarching crime, Walter touches on class, privilege, family structures, LGBT+ life, parenting. Identity Crisis is a 2019 satirical novel about Brexit, cancel culture, Love Island, Cambridge Analytica, Putin, MeToo, Harvey Weinstein, trans rights, gay rights, multiculturalism, Twitter, popular feminism, incels, and a bunch of other shit that I probably forgot about because this book was at least 100 pages longer than it needed to be.