Speak for England [Paperback]

James M. Hawes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 7, 2005

James Hawes' wonderful new novel begins with its protagonist Brian Marley, a divorced, ineffectual teacher, all alone in a jungle about to die live on television. A reluctant contestant on Brit Pluck, Green Hell, Seven Figures, the ultimate reality TV show, Marley has somehow managed to outlive his rivals and win two million quid. Except that the helicopter sent to bring him back to civilization has crashed, and he's on his own, with a portable camera, at the foot of a monstrously tall cliff. He has no option but to start climbing...To his astonishment, Marley doesn't die, although the world he finds at the top of that cliff is remarkably like an Englishman's version of heaven. T here's cricket and rugger, the Union Jack, plucky boys, pretty girls, a tough but fair headmaster - an entire miniature civilization created by the surviving passengers from Comet IV, an airliner which vanished in 1958 carrying a jolly gang of youngsters to a public schools jamboree in Australia. Believing that they were one of the first casualties of World War III, they have survived in their jungle fastness for nearly fifty years, sustained by the Book of Common Prayer and good old English values. Hawes' telling of this tale is as tellingly funny as anything he has ever written, but when Brian's rescuers do find him at last, when the world of the Daily Star confronts that of the Eagle, when the Prime Minister, spotting an opportunity for a sound-bite, meets the Headmaster, the novel shifts gear into a glorious satire worthy of Evelyn Waugh. The Observer called James Hawes 'the funniest British novelist writing today'. Speak for England proves it, over and over again.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this corker of a satire on politics and culture (the author's fifth novel; the first to be published in the U.S.), Brian Marley is plunked down in the horrific jungles of Papua, New Guinea, to compete in Brit Pluck, Green Hell, Two Million, a diabolical survival-reality show. Our Everyman undergoes grueling ordeals and is close to death, yet remains the last man standing. Poised to exit, he witnesses the crash of the helicopters that would carry him to freedom, thus losing all contact with civilization. Dazed and seeking shelter, he discovers not mirage or psychosis, but a colony of British airplane crash survivors tucked away in a time warp since the late '50s. "Just a jolly gang of boys and girls on our way out to the big Commmonwealth Public Schools jamboree in Adelaide" says the self-styled "Vicar." The resourcefulness that carried them thus far leads to their glorious repatriation, whereupon the colony's reactionary Headmaster ousts the British government, turns its social programs topsy-turvy and brokers a deal with the U.S. to become a colony. "We'll be a damn sight freer and have a lot more clout as a state in America than in a United Europe.... We'll be dealing with our own sort in our own language, not with the ruddy Frogs through wop interpreters." Sans two million pounds, sans cushy Foreign Office post proposed to keep him mum about ghastly goings-on back in the jungle and sans nubile blond beauty offered as spouse, our contemporary Candide eschews corruption and succeeds in "making his garden grow" in a most satisfactory fashion.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

This creative American debut combines the TV shows Survivor and Lost with the novel Lord of the Flies. Divorced, broke, and bored Brian Marley decides to risk his life by appearing on an extreme British reality TV show. When he comes up as the surprise winner, surviving several weeks alone in a murderous jungle, he thinks his problems are solved. However, a freak accident leaves him stranded even deeper on the island. Close to death, he miraculously stumbles on a village founded by survivors of a 1958 plane crash. Their utopian community is founded on a pre-1960s prep-school model. At first Marley thinks he's found the answer to twenty-first-century life. Dark and sinister underpinnings of the society slowly become clear. This comic novel is a harsh satirical look at both the age of reality TV and the dangers of romanticizing the past. Marta Segal Block
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 338 pages
• Publisher: MacAdam/Cage; First Edition edition (August 7, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1596921412
• ISBN-13: 978-1596921412
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,367,983 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Loved the first 85%, couldn't finish it, July 18, 2007

By 

Richard L. Goldfarb (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Speak for England (Paperback)

The first 85% of this book was great. It has a wonderful premise, a man on a reality show on his own in the jungles of New Guinea comes upon the remnant of survivors of an air crash of a Comet in the 50's and their progeny, keeping "England" alive in the vain hope that England had survived the nuclear holocaust of which they assumed they were merely the first casualties.

The descriptions of Brian's survival, the flashbacks to the useless and unhappy life he left behind in England, the vanity of the show's producers, the shallowness of the girl Brian had kissed once, all seem spot on. In the colony, both the way they seem to have re-created the artificial England of the Eagle annuals and the enterprising way they dealt with both the natives and their own need to multiply in order to survive are creative and interesting. Hawes writes with assurance and a nice sense of suspense.

Unfortunately, the moment the rescuers show up, Hawes loses it completely. For a bit, I could still read it, but by the time they got back to England a book I was slowly savoring suddenly turned into a book I was skimming. Why? Because what had started out as a reasonable commentary on the current reality television craze added to a reasonable alternative history, suddenly turned into an ending that stopped fitting into any sense of reality. any commentary on contemporary politics but the most lame and most blunt, and essentially forfeited the goodwill of the first part of the book.

Damn shame. It was fun while it lasted. The sex scene is great, too.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A comic and satiric gem, September 13, 2005

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Speak for England (Paperback)

England is haunted. Everybody knows that. It's what explains the ongoing massive popularity of everything from Jane Austen's drawing rooms to Bertie Wooster's London clubs to the smell of tobacco still lingering along Baker Street to Patrick O'Brian's wooden ships and iron men. England is haunted by its history, its literature and its culture, by the memory of all that was and could be again.

Certainly Brian Marley is haunted --- with a name like Marley, he'd almost have to be. James Hawes's new novel, SPEAK FOR ENGLAND, begins with that haunting --- not with Brian Marley's miserable life, or the cultural excesses of Tony Blair's Cool Britannia, or even with the fantastic tale of the survivors of a long-ago plane crash eking out an existence on the high plains of New Guinea.

Marley's ghost is that of a mean-spirited Army officer, a Coldstream Guards version of R. Lee Ermey, if you will. He appears to Marley from inside his head, a disembodied voice. Marley, you see, is stranded on a reality TV show, "Brit Pluck, Green Hell, Two Million," a shameless rip-off of "Survivor" that plants its contestants in the New Guinea rain forest and leaves them with nothing but satellite TV cameras to illustrate their slow descent into madness. Marley is a 43-year-old divorced (and concomitantly depressed) teacher, the last person you'd ever expect to be prepared for such a thing, and he is dropped into the wilds without so much as a Swiss Army knife. The program --- Marley himself describes it as a "stupid, crass, moneymaking competition for idiots" --- turns out to be sadistic enough to make "Fear Factor" look like "Romper Room." Under any normal circumstances, Marley would run screaming for the helicopters that ferry out the losing contestants. This is where the haunting comes into play, and it keeps Marley alive --- although not what you would call sane --- through the show's filming, and past its disastrous end.

Marley eventually survives his ordeal and links up with the survivors of a 1958 plane crash who settled --- they call it "The Colony" --- on a high New Guinea rampart, safe from roving bands of savage aboriginal fighters. Here, the survivors have maintained a simulacrum of 1950s English society under the patriarchal rule of The Headmaster --- the Colony is run along the lines of Eton or Rugby, with side trips to kill the odd wild boar or nomadic native, all done with a stiff upper lip. As the colonists haven't been rescued, the general opinion of the Colony is that England has been destroyed in some nuclear exchange or other --- and that they are the only remnant of a lost civilization. When Marley wanders into their camp, delirious and amnesiac after his ordeal, the Colony is alternately overcome with hope at the possibility of rescue and frustration at his inability to communicate precisely what, if anything, has been going on at Home.

This brief plot synopsis makes SPEAK FOR ENGLAND sound somewhat grim. Not so! The novel is a comic gem, casting a satiric glance over the long range of modern English history, skewering everything from the Falklands war to soccer fandom to the BBC. Think Monty Python with a Tom Wolfe flair. The focus of the novel, of course, is Marley's story and that of the Colony, but the action frequently shifts back to conversations commenting on the whole thing --- from the oversexed television producers who started the show, to Marley's would-be girlfriend and her Argentinian war-hero father, to the back rooms of Number Ten Downing Street. Hawes has a great ear not only for dialogue but for the utter un-self-consciousness of the way people talk when they're sure they are not being overheard and don't give a damn.

The one turnoff for the American reader is the way SPEAK FOR ENGLAND absolutely wallows in nostalgia for early-sixties British pop culture --- understandable and arguably necessary. (It can be countered by inserting your own favorite pop-culture references from your background, no worries.) This is a fine piece of satiric craftsmanship, complete with a warning about the dangers of nostalgia and how even a beneficial haunting can be frightening.
[...]

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars (3.5) A theater of the absurd..., August 4, 2005

By 

Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Speak for England (Hardcover)

Brian Marley is his own harshest critic. Almost forty, his life is the epitome of mediocrity, teaching English to foreigners and seeing his three-year old son on visitation days. When Brian is approached by a producer/acquaintance to appear on a British reality show, Brit Pluck, Green Hell, Two Million, where six contestants will be stranded in the jungles of Papua, New Guinea, he seizes the opportunity.

As shocking to him as the other contestants, Brian outlasts everyone, his final challenge to spend one more week alone on the island. At the end of his physical resources and his tether, sure that death awaits, Marley is filming a final message to his son when he falls from a cliff. When he wakes up, he is no longer surrounded by the fetid jungle, but safe in the well-ordered camp of the survivors of the 1958 crash of an airplane, a De Havilland Comet IV, en route to a huge Commonwealth Public Schools Jamboree. The group has been stranded in New Guinea for over fifty years awaiting rescue, their enclave hidden from surveillance by low-lying clouds. Under the leadership of Headmaster Quartermain, the colony has fared admirably, establishing a daily protocol. The only escape route from camp is a pass that leads to a swamp, but the local tribe tends to snap up strays and cannibalize them.

In this place, time stands still, out of touch with current events or the direction of English politics. It is into this half-century old mindset that Marley arrives, his memory addled by the fall, snippets of memory taken out of context and misinterpreted by his new friends. But the tepid, socially inept Marley is a different man in the able hands of Georgina Harcourt, who takes him under her wing, prompting his recollections. Released from his stultifying past, an uninhibited Brian basks in newfound masculinity, reluctant to release his recent history. Eventually remembering, Brian is lacerated by the truth of his reality, "his poverty, his non-status, his endless failures, his entire lack of charisma and drive, his pathetic attempts at parenthood, his useless car."

Hawes takes a satirical approach to this "everyman" thrust into the spotlight, a newcomer in a colony that has lived by their wits awaiting rescue, their society bound by the rigid control of a leader who has resorted to unorthodox means to ensure the safety of his charges. This insular society has lived on the erroneous suppositions of a country on the brink of world war and advancing Communism, shocked to discover the changes wrought in their absence. Not to worry, after the rescue everyone is a star, Headmaster Quartermain readily accepted into a world in dire need of his extraordinary vision.

Meanwhile, Marley grapples with the sponsors of the reality show for the money he believes he has won, agents wheel and deal for book and movie rights and Brian is a magnet for anyone who has ever known him, however peripherally. The great PR machine is in motion, grinding out images and interviews, spinning fictions. Caught in the middle, Marley is a catalyst for the greatest news story in years, but soon relegated to his former ineptitude, a bumbling fool who grabbed an opportunity for wealth and his fifteen minutes of fame, only to question which reality is really the nightmarish jungle. Luan Gaines/2005.