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Review [published April 1997]
Michael Bracewell: England Is Mine
Jason Weaver
Before his passport read “novelist”, Michael Bracewell
learnt his trade on the first rush of British style magazines.
Much of Bracewell’s work from the mid-80s
could be found in Arena, sibling to The Face but with
a considerably higher brow. Sadly, the magazine got
crushed in the publishing stampede that has instead
brought respectability to top shelf reading. After the
breakdown-and-prozac cocktail of his last novel Saint
Rachel – a moving meditation on mental distress
– Bracewell has resumed his former cultural commentary.
This time the canvas is broader. England Is
Mine purports to have a thesis but is more a collection
of essays masquerading as a whole, short stories rather
than a novel. His subject is pop. Does this mean pop
as in popular, Pop as in Art, or pop as in Top Of The?
Well, Bracewell would argue all three. I’m not sure
he’s right.
He claims that domestic art of the 20th century is always
fighting for its own piece of England: “The rebels
in England’s Arcady … are defending the Arcadian
values that they love, passionately, from what they recognise
as abuse at the hands of self-serving tyrants and
BUY Michael Bracewell books online from and
their occupying armies.” According to Bracewell, this
Arcady satisfies the “need within the psyche of Englishness
to look back to an idealized past…” Nostalgia
is apparently intrinsic to our national culture.
The title of the book comes, presumably, from a line
in The Smiths’ ‘Still Ill’. Bracewell’s cause finds a
strong ally in Morrissey, who sang “A rush and a push
and the land that we stand on is ours”. Morrissey is the
conscience of lost Arcady: beleaguered, revolutionary,
pastoral and drenched in the perfume of the past.
England Is Mine, however, wants to plot the entire
century through these tinted spectacles. The opening
chapter deals with the Culture And Anarchy paranoia
of the new century and, in doing so, attempts to lay
foundations. We drop in on Wilde and Waugh and Forster
to see if they think Old England is dying. We take
in a movie, a War and hear a few poems and songs. It
isn’t always clear where we are going. I mean, who
invited Enid Blyton to this party? Bracewell might be
excellent on the fine details but his sense of overall
design is rickety. Whenever his theme comes up, it
seems frankly incidental.
109
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