Britain Colonized: Hollywood’s Appropriation of British Literature (review)
frame and trajectory: both proved casualties of their liberal foundations" (138). This statement also serves as the conclusion of the study since what follows is, in the author's own words, "more coda than conclusion" (141): a survey of contemporary British novels that use the estate novel formula to represent the missed opportunities of the postwar settlement era in British society. The section includes brief but thought-provoking discussions of Angus Wilson's Setting the World on Fire, Muriel Spark's The Girls of Slender Means, Ian McEwan's Atonement, and Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day that could form the basis for further study on the subject. Looking at this last section, if any conclusion is to be drawn from the book, it should be that late modernist writers, who belonged mostly to upper middle classes, were, at best, uncomfortable with the idea of a more democratic distribution of wealth that formed the basis of the postwar settlement in Britain. Therefore, MacKay concludes, the "attack on the humane liberalism of 'the British cultural elite', the intellectual aristocracy of late modernism, found its political corollary in Thatcherite ideology, which welcomed with open arms both its philistinism and its apportioning of blame for industrial decline to the idiocies of the progressively minded" (155). This is a reasonable conclusion; however, MacKay does little to familiarize the reader with the cultural atmosphere of postwar settlement or the ensuing era of Thatcherite regime. MacKay's assumption that the reader is already familiar with this historical context is yet another proof that this book is a particularly valuable addition to the historical study of British culture and the Second World War, but its contribution to literary scholarship is limited: while it has a promising start and shows occasional signs of brilliance, these are not often enough to sustain the interest of the reader looking for more than the historicist approach MacKay employs.