RESULTS

All Dr John Goode asks is for a little house in north London where people read "The Paper" and speaking decent English doesn't get his kids kicked. Though spending 1984-89 studying East Germany was possibly a mistake, surely 15 years of solid lecturing has earned John Goode (PhD) the right to such a modestly normal life. But while planting a plum tree in his little south-London garden, Goode finds a long-buried assault rifle. Before he has time to think, he is sent staggering from the Red Lion in Peckham to Prague to Dresden. He finds that Europe, liberalism and the ice caps are all melting down faster than his inhibitions: normal is gone with the wind and cultivating one's own garden these days needs more than just a spade. And if the world won't keep to the bargain he made in 1984, maybe John Goode, Doctor of Philosophy, has just found a tool to renegotiate the deal...

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. There'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.