Carnival Time

Peter Craven

• The Remake by Clive James
  Cape, 223 pp, £10.95, October 1987, ISBN 0 224 02525 2
• In the Land of Oz by Howard Jacobson
  Hamish Hamilton, 380 pp, £12.95, September 1987, ISBN 0 241 12110 8

The more Britain affects a déclassé manner while Thatcherism increases the gulf between rich and poor, the more it comes, superficially, to resemble Australia. Linguists speculate that the Australian accent at its purest and broadest is simply an intact version of late 18th and early 19th-century London English. Who knows? I don’t want to overdetermine to the point of absurdity, but it seems fairly obvious that what Clive James represents is a kind of stylised distortion of what Britain sees itself as: a kind of self-possessed jokey coarseness, very smart and very educated, a sort of sharp-talking deified moron – who then has to be defined (surprise, surprise) as Australian.