Make this text for retelling:

Text 2: Nature and the English Countryside
Julian Barnes is one of Britain’s most highly regarded contemporary novelists, having now published eleven novels, including A History of the World in 10/2 Chapters and Flaubert’s Parrot. His 1998 England, England describes how the essence of England is condensed into a theme park which is a massive tourist success, while the real England is neglected and ignored. 
The first extract describes how the originator of the theme park, Sir Jack Pitman, describes his view of the artificial nature of the English countryside to one of his employees, and how people today don’t want wild Nature. The second extract describes the Isle of Wight, an English county and island separated from Great Britain, chosen to be the site for Pitman’s grandiose theme park project. 
‘Do you like the countryside, Mark?’ 
‘Sure. Yes, I like it. I like it enough. That’s to say, I like driving through it.’ 
‘I was in the countryside quite recently. In the countryside, I stress that. I do not wish to pull rank, but the point of the countryside is not to go through it but to be in it. I make this point every year when I address the Ramblers’ Association. Even so, Mark, when you go through it, presumably in your modest, inattentive way. You like the way it looks?’ 
‘Yes,’ said the Project Manager, ‘I like the way it looks.’ 
‘And you like it, I suppose, because you think it an example of Nature?’ 

‘You could put it that way.’ Mark wouldn’t have done so himself, but he knew that he was now enlisted in his employer’s more bullying version of the Socratic dialogue. 
‘And Nature made the countryside as Man made the cities?’ 
‘More or less, yes.’ 
‘More or less, no, Mark. I stood on a hill the other day and looked down an undulating field past a copse towards a river and as I did so a pheasant stirred beneath my feet. You, as a person passing through, would no doubt have assumed that Dame Nature was going about her eternal business. I knew better, Mark. The hill was an Iron Age burial mound, the undulating field a vestige of Saxon agriculture, the copse was a copse only because a thousand other trees had been cut down, the river was a canal and the pheasant had been hand-reared by a gamekeeper. We change it all, Mark, the trees, the crops, the animals. And now, follow me further. That lake you discern on the horizon is a reservoir, but when it has been established a few years, when fish swim in it and migrating birds make it a port of call, when the treeline has adjusted itself and little boats ply their picturesque way up and down it, when these things happen it becomes, triumphantly, a lake, don’t you see? It becomes the thing itself. 
‘Reality is rather like a rabbit, if you’ll forgive the aphorism. The great public – our distant, happily distant paymasters – want reality to be like a pet bunny. They want 43 it to lollop along and thump its foot picturesquely in its home-made hutch and eat lettuce out of its hand. If you gave them the real thing, something wild that bit, and, if, you’ll pardon me, shat, they wouldn’t know what to do with it. Except strangle it and cook it.’ 




* * *
 ‘The island’ he began, ‘as Sir Jack pointed out two weeks ago, is a diamond. Otherwise a lozenge. Some have compared it to a turbot. Twenty-three miles in length, thirteen across at its widest point. One hundred and fifty-five square miles. Each comer at a cardinal point of the compass, more or less. Was once joined to the mainland, back in the days of sedimentary rock and flint arrowheads. Could find out, but pretelevision, anyway. Topography: mixture of rolling chalk downland of considerable beauty and bungaloid dystopia.’ 
‘Mark, again this false distinction between Nature and Man. I have warned you. Also the long words. What was that last phrase again?’ 
‘Bungaloid dystopia.’ 
‘So undemocratic. So elitist. I might have to borrow it.’ 
Mark knew he would. It was one of Sir Jack’s ways of complimenting you. And he had tartishly sought the compliment. So far, so good. He picked up his narrative. ‘The place is pretty flat on the whole. Good-looking cliffs. I thought the Committee might like a souvenir.’ 
From his pocket he took a small glass lighthouse filled with bands of differently coloured sand. ‘Local speciality. From Alum Bay. Twelve or so colours. Easy to replicate, I’d say. The sand, I mean.’ He placed the lighthouse on Sir Jack’s desk, inviting the possibility of comment. None came.
 ‘Otherwise some things called chines, which are a bit like ravines where streams have cut away the chalk cliffs on their way to the sea. Much used by smugglers. Flora and fauna: nothing particularly rare and endangered. A detail about squirrels: they only have the red variety because it’s an island and the grey buggers never managed to catch the boat. But I can’t see anyone making a fuss about them. Oh yes, and slightly bad news, Sir Jack.’ He waited for a tufty, black, grey-threaded eyebrow to lift. ‘They do have puffins.’