Inconceivable

Aside from the rich vein of gags about DIY conception (Sam has to leave a power lunch with the excuse: "Sorry, my wife is ovulating ..."), Elton also subjects the TV industry to relentless stand-up-style bombardment, giving birth to some brilliant asides, which enrich the main story but never overpower it. Funny, tragic, true and ultimately heart-warming, this book should be available on the National Health Service. --Matthew Baylis

Reader Reviews:

An interesting idea (2/2 people found this helpful)

Ben Elton taps his personal career to produce a book centered around a couple working at the BBC. The entire book is formed from the couple's personal diaries, created to help then deal with the difficulty of getting pregnant. As per usual, the Elton brand of wit is sharp, rude and cutting edge, hitting on the taboo areas of our everyday lives most people don't feel comfortable talking about. It's interesting reading since Elton never hints at where he's leading you, or to about which subject he will open up like a can of worms next. The charactisation will make you ask questions of yourself as Elton is uncanny in his portrayal of human psychology and behaviour - it's very Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. So far, it's all good news. However, I did find that the actual flow of the book was somewhat impeded by the Diary Entry form of the book. Overall it's a good read; which is on-the-ball with cultural events and humour, but the format, although original, prevents real immersion and gets rather stale towards the end.

Well written, and profoundly moving in places (2/2 people found this helpful)

Having covered subjects such as reality television, drug culture, gender politics, Friends Reunited, gangland crime and The First World War, Ben Elton now ventures into the foray of relationships, dreams and pregnancy. This is a novel about a man's desperation to write a blockbuster film, and a woman's fruitless desperate attempts to conceive a child. Elton structures the novel in a series of diary entries, each written from the view of the male/female protagonist; and I was especially surprised with the conviction and reality that Elton managed to get into his female spokesman.

'Inconceivable' contains a perfect blend of emotional drama and laugh out loud comedy. It is filled with the highs and lows of love and life, it captures the yearning and desire and determination of modern people, as well as delving deep into two fraught people's personalities; hence the reality and superb characterisation exhibited by Elton in this book. Its a nice, light easy, and entertaining read, and I would recommend it most highly.

Different Than The Average (0/0 people found this helpful)

Ben Elton, as many of us fans out there know, tends to write murder thrillers with that touch of comedy that everything he has ever done, and ever will do, has. This however does not follow his traditional murder mystery whodunnit. This book is even written in a totally different narration style. Generally he writes in the third person to explain the story throughout. Thi time there is NO third person involved. He writes in a style that many writers have tried and only half have pulled off successfully. He uses two characters as the focus, Sam and Lucy a couple trying to have a baby but cannot conceive. The way their stories are told respectively are as a form of diary entry.

It is set up so that they are writing provate letters to no-one to let out their sad emotions and frustrations at the inability to conceive. The focus of the story is love. Whether love between the two is strong enough to survive if they cannot conceive or reliant on a child. Each character also has their own private battles. Sam is a BBC worker dreaming of writing a hit programme or film, but he has no inspiration. Lucy is an agent's assistant, who's newest client happens to be the hottest new, gorgeous British actor on the scene. As the two face their separate battles, can they focus on Lucy's main goal, a child. Sam isn't as determined seemingly to have a child as he feels that it would just be a bonus, he feels he loves Lucy enough to be happy with her forever, child or not.

The story has great one liners that will make even the person with the least sense of humour in the world to crack a smile. It is funny throughout ut also has the touch of seriousness also. Tears could flow at points. I enjoyed this, finished it just this afternoon. If you like his other books you'll love this too. If you hve never read anything of his before this could be a good start as it shows how he can hold a story well and keep things moving. It also dislays the difficult technique of balancing two characters roles equally, which he succeeds seeminlgly with ease.

Maybe Baby - Definitely Excellent (2/2 people found this helpful)

"Inconceivable" is probably familiar to many readers through the film version , "Maybe Baby". Well, I haven't actually seen the film, so I came fresh to the novel, and I'm very glad that I did. This is just possibly my favourite of all Elton's novels.

There's no mystery, no murders in this one. Its an unashamedly sentimental story of a relationship between a husband and wife who, for reasons they nor anybody else are able to understand, seem unable to have a baby.

Sam and Lucy Bell are both media types. Sam is a commissioning editor for the BBC, while Lucy works as an assistant to a theatrical agent. The interesting premise behind the book is that one of the many people they have consulted about their problem has told them to try to get in touch with their feelings about the situation more by writing in a book about their feelings every day, but not to show it to the other. So throughout the novel you have the two viewpoints of each event, one in normal type, the other in italic. It's a good narrative device, and Elton exploits it richly for its comic value, and also for genuine pathos.

It's a book about love, and especially about betrayal, which takes surprising forms in the narrative. I did worry, as the end approached, that Elton might cop out. I'm glad to say that he didn't, and it's a highly satisfying read. But be warned- although very funny ( in places I laughed out loud ) its also very serious, and moving. A box of tissues should be kept on standby when you read it.

HYSTEROSALPINGOGRAMS AND ALL THAT (4/4 people found this helpful)

Ben Elton's style has been got under a bit of control since the heady early days of Stark. He still takes the occasional potshot at incidental targets, but he no longer fires a scattergun in every direction as he did then. As often, he picks a topic that might seem to call for the utmost delicacy and tact and treats it with the utmost frankness and even ribaldry. The topic in question is human infertility, although there is a very entertainingly-handled sub-plot of life within the BBC in addition. His style of comedy has always been to highlight the grotesque side of things, and so it remains here. This doesn't show any lack of human sympathy on his part - indeed very much the reverse I should say - but he is not for the shy or the oversensitive much less for the solemn or the pompous.

The processes of human sexuality verge on the absurd at the best of times whatever else can be said about them. When we factor in the exceptional manoeuvres increasingly demanded by a desperate mid-30's childless wife from her less committed husband, culminating in the lurid rituals of IVF, I think it's fair to say that it takes a certain type of writer to deal with such a theme successfully. Ben Elton handles it brilliantly. We are not spared the most graphic or intimate physical and anatomical details, but the comic style Elton adopts really masks a true delicacy of perception. Indeed I'm inclined to say that nobody with less of a sense of humour than the two protagonists show in this book would have been able to see the whole gruesome process through. The humour is very English humour, and I think I know what it's modelled on to a great extent. During the years of the Thatcher Terror, there used to be a hilarious column in the magazine Private Eye purporting to consist of letters from her husband to a friend named Bill. These were written in a very public-school idiom, probably derived basically from P G Wodehouse but influenced by minor literature such as the Molesworth books, familiar also from Oxford common-rooms and similar places of association, and updated more recently into the dialogue of the chattering classes in Islington and similar parts of London, the form in which we find it here. This idiom can take the heaviness out of the most serious situations without trivialising them, and whether or not I'm right about its precise origin in this book that is the way its author tries to use it, and tries very successfully in my own opinion.

The author never speaks to us directly throughout the whole book, using instead the device of diaries written by the husband and wife, much as is done in Julian Barnes's Talking it Over. The device works very well here. Ben Elton is an observer and critic with a particularly acute eye for human behaviour and attitudes, and it helps if he steps back a little from the narrative for that very reason. The incidents in the story are often Rabelaisian and hilarious, but the dilemmas and worse that the characters face are touched in with no little sympathy as well as perceptiveness. The style of writing has even gained a little (dare I say this?) refinement, to its and our general benefit I'd say. The ending is genuinely touching, so on balance 5 stars.

Ben Elton

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