Fist of Five: Five Books about England and Englishness

JMcL

When satirists Flanders and Swann set out to compose an alternative English national anthem, they decided to open with what they described as typical understatement:

'The English, the English, the English are best! I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest!'

Perhaps in today's political climate, with the nastier side of nationalism on display pretty much everywhere, the satirical duo's 'Song of Patriotic Prejudice' is too close to the bone to be funny. But as the UK lumbers unsteadily towards the [Br]exit, this seems as good a time as any to recommend five books exploring some of the strands that make up 'English' (and occasionally British) national identity.

Watching the English: the Hidden Rules of English Behaviour by Kate Fox

Anthropologist Kate Fox set out to apply her analytical skills to her own tribe. Her study of the rules that underpin English codes of behaviour and shape the cultural stereotype of Englishness - from queuing to talking about the weather and ignoring each other on public transport - is equally illuminating about the English in particular, and about anthropology in general.

Bloody Foreigners by Robert Winder

Winder sets out to explore the history of more than two millennia of immigration, concluding that our island story is one of constant movement and migration, and that coming from somewhere else is a more central facet of English identity than is generally recognised. Like David Olusoga's Black and British and Miranda Kaufmann's Black Tudors, Winder's book is full of fascinating individual stories and insights into how the country's response to 'bloody foreigners' has changed over the centuries.

The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth

The bloody foreigners of Kingsnorth's novel are the Normans: when these vicious 'ingengas' murder his family, farmer Buccmaster retreats into the Lincolnshire marshes with a small band of guerilla fighters. But isolated from the world he knows, struggling to assert his authority, and haunted by mystical visions that may or may not indicate that he's a god, Buccmaster becomes increasingly disturbed - especially when he learns that he's got a rival for his self-proclaimed status as leader of the resistance (Hereward - the Wake of the title). Written in an invented language that mixes blunt and brutal contemporary English with Anglo-Saxon, this is a brilliant novel, that sometimes feels as if it's set in a dystopian future rather than the distant past. Is Buccmaster a lost legendary English hero? Or a deranged psychopath? You decide.

1066 and All That by W C Sellar and R J Yeatman

With its title another nod to the Normans, Sellar and Yeatman's entertaining parody of old-school History teaching offers a charmingly mangled outline of 'traditional' history. First published in 1930, long before Horrible Histories colonised the genre, this comic classic charts England's inexorable rise to becoming Top Nation, dividing events along the way into 'Good Things' and 'Bad Things', and monarchs into 'Good Kings' or 'Bad Kings'. Interspersed by increasingly eccentric test papers ('do not attempt to write on both sides of the paper at once'), 1066 and All That gently spoofs England's self-image, and will delight anyone who enjoys Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett (and struggles to tell King Alfred from King Arthur).  

Small Island by Andrea Levy

Set in 1948, 18 years after 1066 and All That had declared that history was at an end because America was now Top Nation, Levy's novel tells the story of Gilbert Joseph, who leaves his own small island of Jamaica for another, Great Britain. Shifting between the perspectives of different characters and flashing back to the war and the time before it, the novel explores three interwoven stories of love, conflict, adaptation and adjustment against the backdrop of a dramatically changing world. Powerful, moving and ultimately optimistic, the novel won the Whitbread Novel Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005, and is recommended to anyone who wants to find out more about the experience of the Windrush Generation, and the contrast between the Britain they thought they were going to, and the country they actually found.