Speak for England

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.