BEST BOOKS ON... AMERICA
THE day the U.S. announced it would be easing its entry restrictions from November, a friend in Florida posted a tantalisingly inviting picture of a tropical-looking garden fringing a white clapboard house and pretty plunge pool.
‘Friends and family in Britain — who we miss so much! — our guesthouse and pool are yours.’ Guesthouse? Pool? It took a quite remarkable level of self-control not to start checking flights straight away.
Later, I saw that Virgin Atlantic had reported a 600 per cent surge in UK bookings to the U.S. and wondered how many of them had been triggered by similar invitations from too-long-distant friends and family.
There are many memorable fictional journeys across the pond. TransAtlantic, by Colum McCann, interweaves the stories of Alcock and Brown, who in 1919 became the first pilots to fly non-stop across the ocean, with the stories of abolitionist Frederick Douglass’s visit to Ireland in the 19th century and Senator George Mitchell’s brokering of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
Home Stretch, by Graham Norton, is a contemporary novel that moves between Ireland and New York. In 1987, a terrible accident and a vortex of secrets and lies compels Connor Hayes to leave small town Cork for first Liverpool, then London and then New York. There, a generation later, a chance meeting in a Manhattan gay bar persuades him to fly home and face up to his past.
There are unforgettable literary transatlantic sea passages, too. In Colm Tóibin’s heartrending 1950s-set Brooklyn, Eilis Lacey — pushed by her family to emigrate from rural Ireland — finds the trip aboard the ship there tortuous.
In the 1930s, Charles Ryder, in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, crosses from New York to London in absolute luxury — but that does not protect his wife, Celia, from horrendous seasickness. Celia being confined to her cabin pushes him into the company of Julia Flyte, with whom he begins a passionate but ultimately doomed love affair.
Should you take advantage of the easing of restrictions and fly, or even cruise, to the U.S. from today, have a safe journey.