LIE BACK AND THINK OF ENGLAND
A SYNOPSIS
Fred Pike, a tough, though thoughtful, white East-Londoner, fought for his Country in The Great War, and now, on the eve of Neville Chamberlain's famous broadcast, announcing the start of the second Great Conflict, he suffers a disturbing dream - heralding a Black Britain in which he is pushed around in his own country to the extent that he writes to The King, seeking his help. Meanwhile, the Daily Mail hears of his plight in getting the sack from his job in the shoe factory, and offers to publish his story for the sum of forty thousand pounds. But the 'deal' goes horribly wrong, and in the midst of a gruesome sex scene, Fred is woken from his nightmare by his wife who informs him of a new war with Germany....'Oh, is that all?' he responds with relief.
After the war, he tries to pick up the pieces of his life; even kills a burglar with his old bayonet and buries the body in the back garden. But his second dramatic nightmare, featuring Islamic extremism, is just too much to bear. He cracks under the strain, dies, and waits for his wife to join him 'on the other side'.
Funny, 'politically incorrect' and 'subversive', this tale might well have been the nightmare of more than one honest Englishman - a glimpse of the future with its inverted prejudices and the struggle for power. Could this be black humour at its blackest?
Review by Daniel M Harrison
From the author of The House of Baghdad, the cult classic written before September 11th 2001 that predicted an horrific attack on New York via a commercial jet airliner, comes Tony Sharp's highly anticipated novel Lie Back and Think of England.
Lie Back and Think of England is not just a farcical romp through an England with which readers of the Daily Mail will be all too sympathetic, but a surreal sci-fi-esque journey into the political grounds where few authors other than Sharp would dare to tread in this day and age.
The book is divided into two parts. In the first half, Sharp documents the terrifying dream of protagonist Fred Pike, a working class white British male. Fred Pike's "nightmare" involves a post-World War II Britain being overrun by black people to the extent that the island resembles something more akin to today's post-civil war Sierra Leone than anything Anglo Saxon. In the second half, Fred Pike awakes to find that this dream was a glimpse into a future that Sharp eventually uses to set up a tragi-comic twist at the climax of the book.
Lie Back and Think of England is billed as "politically incorrect", though this label doesn't even scratch the surface in describing just how racially charged Sharp's protagonist is, and how offensive some readers may find the content of this book. To many 21st century readers, Sharp's fictional landscape borders on cultural terrorism.
Unlike the majority of political satire today, Lie Back and Think of England doesn't attempt to get any cliché one-liner laughs: instead, Sharp would rather make you reconsider the entire paradigm of modern humor.
Critics of Sharp's work immediately seize on the obviously offensive nature of his narratives, but in doing so they miss the greater point. Through a script-style pace, Tony Sharp is deliberately attempting to construct a universe which gives a voice to an increasingly forgotten Britain, and in doing so he highlights the prohibition of freedom of speech and the absurdity of the modern political world. When understood in that context, Sharp may not be pandering to modern middle-class taste, but his narratives are some of the few refreshing challenges to the increasingly sabotaged debate over freedom of expression.
Daniel M. Harrison
TheGlobalPerspective.Biz
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