With apologies to the late Tip O'Neill, it could be said that all humor is local. Palin is best known for his work as a member of Monty Python's Flying Circus, the comedy troupe that poked fun at quaint English customs with a subtle humor Americans enjoyed but probably did not fully understand. Palin serves up much of the same in this light but entertaining first novel about Martin Sproale, a postal worker in a small seaside town trying to save his beloved post office from the ravaging forces of modernization, technology, Thatcherite greed, and the European Union. Sproale strives to emulate his hero, Ernest Hemingway, trying to transform himself into the contumacious American writer to battle the novel's corporate villains. An American Hemingway scholar writing in England feeds his obsession and encourages him in his struggle, culminating in a very Pythonesque denouement. Hemingway is well crafted and witty, but the personalities and peculiarities in this humorous portrait of small-town English life lose some of their context on this side of the Atlantic. --Ted Leventhal