It's a jungle out there

Here's a terrific premise for a book. What if a British Comet airliner crashed into a remote jungle in 1958, and the trapped survivors built and preserved a society paralysed in the values, habits and assumptions of upper-middle class England of the Macmillan era?

Here's another premise for a book - somewhat less original, but still quite engaging. What if there was a TV reality show in which four people were dropped in the remotest jungle on earth, and the one who lived longest won £2 million?

And what if you were a middle-aged single father, driven to sign up for the show in a desperate attempt to win a future for your son or die in the attempt?

Each of these plots would provide plenty of rich material for satire. However, in Speak for England, James Hawes has combined two high-concept plots into what might be called an ultra-concept novel.

His gameshow competitor, the fortysomething Brian Marley, stumbles across the colony of culturally ossified British just as he is on his final legs trying to survive a game show called Brit Pluck, Green Hell, Two Million.

You might call the result an embarrassment of riches. Or alternatively, you might say it was laying it on a bit thick. However, it is clear that Hawes believes that, when it comes to satire, reality not only can but should be rendered so elastic that it can spring outside any recognised, or recognisable boundaries.

Thus not only do we get the combined improbabilities of the jungle game show/crash survivors story axis, but a number of sub plots involving a Blair-ish PM flying into the jungle to exploit the publicity opportunities and being caned by the "headmaster" who runs the colony, and indeed the eventual election to power in England of the " headmaster" who runs the colony to impose 1950s values, discipline and National Service back on a thankful public.

It's all completely barmy, and rather dementedly appealing. Handled deftly enough, it could have confronted any number of challenging questions about what it now means to be English, and the sheer gulf between us today and the England of 50 years ago.

And when the book does flicker into life, it does so at the moments when Marley is trying to explain to the bemused jungle colonists what has happened to the old country during their absence. "What? No Englishmen on the moon at all?"

The trouble is, good satire, however far-fetched, still has to be convincing within its own artificial parameters. Characters still have to convince even as they are lampooned - some nugget of reality is what makes even the heaviest layer of irony convincing.