I wish I'd written Robinson Crusoe

The ongoing popularity of Desert Island Discs, the enduring nature of the desert island cartoon complete with shipwrecked sailor under single palm tree, the lottery- winning pipe-dream of owning some water-encircled paradise in the Tropics - it all points backwards to Daniel Defoe's masterpiece The Life and Strange and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, written in 1719. Maybe Britain's island mentality makes it a particular favourite, but Robinson Crusoe has a universal appeal, a story that goes right to the core of existence.

Defoe's skills as a narrator are unquestionable. Faced with the impossible task of describing 20-odd years of isolation without use of dialogue, he stretches and compresses passages of time by use of Crusoe's 'Journal' - a brilliant literary device. Crusoe tussles with religion, fights off disease, re-discovers basic survival techniques, but most importantly he conquers solitude. What is it to be alive? Crusoe struggles for the answer, driven by the irresistible and often dehumanising urge to survive.

Some modern critics have seen the book as a distasteful metaphor for the colonising English spirit. It's an argument that has its merits. But if that is the limitation asked of it by the reader, it can be equally argued that Crusoe gets everything he deserves: comeuppance for his plundering greed and his dabbling in slavery. 'No man is an island,' wrote John Donne. Defoe described the heaven and hell a man might go through when an island is exactly what he turns out to be.