Posting It Home

TITLE: Notes from a Small Island
AUTHOR: Bill Bryson
PUBLISHER: Harper Perennial

RATING
5/5 "Year in Provence"; 4/5 "Summer of '69"; 3/5 "12 Days of Christmas"; 2/5 "Weekend at Bernie's"; 1/5 "Day of the Dead"
SCORE: 4/5

Mr Bryson, American by birth but British by choice for most of his professional life, built a thunderous reputation for his hysterically funny, gloriously opinionated and deliciously warped writing style. His brand is built on the comfort that comes from reliability, and Notes from a Small Island comes as close as you'll get to a pure distillation of the Bryson mini-genre.

Reading one of Bill Bryson's books is, ironically enough, a bit like stepping into one of the McDonald's he so loathes. His name on the cover is as much a signpost and promise as the golden arches. Before you've even digested the Library of Congress data, you already have a fairly good idea of how the rest of it is going to taste.

The ostensible subject is Mr Bryson's tour of the UK prior to moving briefly back to the US in the mid 90s, but this quasi-victory lap gets second billing next to Mr Bryson's own interior monologue of memories, acidic commentary on the state of modern architecture, and other off-the-wall thoughts. For such a brilliant travel writer, he again proves an appallingly bad traveler. Mr Bryson travels largely alone, often by rail or bus, frequently without checking the timetable and almost never with a reservation waiting at the end. He encounters Fawltyesque hoteliers, boorish trainspotters and man-eating Labradors - but the main threat to his health is his habit of trying to walk back to his hotel after about three pints too many.

Travel writing can sometimes feel like subsidizing somebody else's good time, to places you've never heard of at prices you couldn't afford; Andean backpacking, Andaman Sea scuba-diving, or pretty much anything in Conde Nast Traveler. Not so with Mr Bryson. Let other writers tackle the Bamiyan Valley or Borobudur - Mr Bryson takes you nowhere more exotic than Barnstaple and Bradford. But then, that's what makes reading his books so much like burrowing into a favorite sweater.

Not that Mr Bryson is without the power to impress. The awe he feels on viewing a Roman mosaic at a ruined villa in Spoonley Wood, intact and in situ, is palpable and moving. The anger and sadness he seems to feel at the cancerous corrosion eating away at small-town England feels genuine, as does his passion for the English countryside (and, unlike many weekend enthusiasts, Mr Bryson put his family where his mouth is, living first in rural Yorkshire, and more recently a small town in Norfolk).

Above all, in spite of his news-ticker stream of grumbling about almost everyone he meets, you get a strong sense of Mr Byson's love for the English themselves. He is full of praise for their politeness, good humor, their delight in life's small pleasures. That said, the book's one sour note is how pat Mr Bryson's observations of the English are. According to Wikipedia, in a 2003 BBC4 Radio poll, Notes from a Small Island was voted the book which best represented England, which probably says far more about the British self-image than the reality. At the very least, you have to think there's something other than good manners and jokes at work in the country that gave the world soccer hooliganism.

Just as the portrait of the English painted here somewhat lacking in perspective, Mr Bryson's coverage of the British Isles is on the teenager end of the spotty scale. Of the UK's great university towns, Oxford rates a visit, but Cambridge gets a miss (secretly gratifying to those of us whose parents went to the former). The famous white cliffs are notable primarily for their absence. There's a gaping hole where the center of England should be, and what bits of Wales make it into the book probably wish they hadn't.

However the greatest problem with Notes from a Small Island, as with Big Macs, is that comfort starts to wear after a bit, and you yearn for something a bit tangier, a bit zestier, something that will surprise. Just as his books are superficially similar to one another, so the individual episodes that make up Notes from a Small Island begin to run together - small towns, good, large towns, bad. Old buildings good, new buildings, bad. To paraphrase Mr Bryson himself, the trick to good travel writing is knowing when to stop, and here--even when presented with an obvious finale like the northern tip of Scotland--he fails to take his own advice. The end result is undoubtedly funny, but in need of some strategic trimming.

Perhaps even Mr Bryson began to feel he was recycling his own greatest hits, as he now writes on diverse subjects such as the English language, the history of science and the life of Shakespeare. Luckily, these books too are uproariously funny, and highly recommended once you've devoured Mr Bryson's travelogues.