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The remarkable thing about English literature and letters is that they have never been really English. Or not so remarkable, perhaps. But don't ask me to survey the field - any attempt to browse the literature pages of a broadsheet, for example, induces lethal sleepiness, cramps, and a desire to kill: followed by a retreat back to the pages of Hodgson, O'Brien, or or Austen. It's a simple rule. We all agree. All non-genre literature is rubbish. All "literary" writing should be treated as toilet paper - and while that rule may have exceptions, life is to short to winnow them out. Novels are acquired as status symbols, much as political attitudes are. No-one in London is naff enough to read for pleasure. Why this profound alienation, constant weader? I don't know. But I can make some guesses. Part of it is the good old class struggle. The English people have no voice, and have not really had one since Senlac. They have been ruled, from London, by a collation of poofs, timeservers, hacks and politicians, and their pet immigrants, for the last thousand years. It's all the odder to hear the voice of England in something from Savoy Savoy? Yes, blasphemous Savoy. Shouting out the authentic voice of Albion. What is this voice like? Well, profoundly crude and dirty, for one thing. And I do mean profoundly crude. This is English culture, after all, and the English were decapitated and ruled by aliens long ago. Despite Blake, only the culture of the lavatory-wall and the playground-rhyme has remained unbroken. Gathering together something out of that is not easy. It's like listening to an intelligent man who keeps swearing, who just can't help it. (But I hasten to add this man is not Meadly, who is a sort of shaman of this alchemical dirt, but an abstraction). So what have we here? . But SAVOY |