Book 59: "Blind Faith" by Ben Elton
Thursday, August 14th, 2008 18:03![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittiwakeThe vast majority of women looked forward to a trip to the gym as it involved almost no exercise at all. The vast Temple-funded facilities which all women were expected to attend after the birth of a child offered a series of massages, steam baths, inspirational seminars, mass holistic 'treatments' and extravagant communal declarations of faith, and clients consumed enormous quantities of 'health bars' and 'health drinks' while sitting about in towels. In fact, because the gym experience consisted principally of hours of sloth, personal indulgence and guilt-free eating, people tended to come out heavier than they went in. Most women would be pregnant again before they had had the chance to get their figures back anyway. Nonetheless it was important to be seen to be making a personal commitment to self-improvement. Pretending to exercise was an important part of the ritual of self-love and self-love was of course the love of God.
Trafford and his wife Chantorria live in an England run by a strange Christian sect, where everyone 'shares' their innermost feelings and the minutiae of their lives with everyone else, and the wish to keep anything private is thought of as a 'perversion', as well as being highly illegal. Trafford knows that he can't be alone in seeing the contradictions in the laws and social customs, and in wanting privacy, but there are spies at work and in his apartment block, and his personal confessor is always there to keep an eye on him, even pulling him up for not posting the video of his child's birth online.
If I lived there I would be tempted to create a totally fake blog, like one of the characters in this book, who copies drivel out of of other people's blogs, and posts photographs and video of women who look fairly similar, safe in the knowledge that nobody is going to look at her blog closely enough to notice, as long as she keeps updating it.
This book reminded me of my least favourite film ever, "Stealing Beauty", which I loathed beyond all reason, due to the intrusiveness of the adult characters with their constant grilling of the teenager as to what she was thinking and how she felt about absolutely everything. But that's my hang-up : (
Trafford and his wife Chantorria live in an England run by a strange Christian sect, where everyone 'shares' their innermost feelings and the minutiae of their lives with everyone else, and the wish to keep anything private is thought of as a 'perversion', as well as being highly illegal. Trafford knows that he can't be alone in seeing the contradictions in the laws and social customs, and in wanting privacy, but there are spies at work and in his apartment block, and his personal confessor is always there to keep an eye on him, even pulling him up for not posting the video of his child's birth online.
If I lived there I would be tempted to create a totally fake blog, like one of the characters in this book, who copies drivel out of of other people's blogs, and posts photographs and video of women who look fairly similar, safe in the knowledge that nobody is going to look at her blog closely enough to notice, as long as she keeps updating it.
This book reminded me of my least favourite film ever, "Stealing Beauty", which I loathed beyond all reason, due to the intrusiveness of the adult characters with their constant grilling of the teenager as to what she was thinking and how she felt about absolutely everything. But that's my hang-up : (
