Bryson’s latest travels familiar, amusing ground
A little more than 20 years ago, Bill Bryson wandered the green and pleasant lands of his adopted home, Britain, and found amusingly cantankerous things to say at nearly every turn. Theweather, the public transit systems, the architecture, the food and especially the people— everything about Britain came in for goodnatured grumbling, and all of it ended up in his book “Notes From a Small Island.”
The British responded to their ungracious American guest by turning him into a national celebrity, buying his book by the million and bestowing upon him every honor this side of a knighthood.
The reception said much about the British character, which in its post-empire incarnation forbids taking oneself too seriously. Bryson clearly loved Britain— professing in the book’s final pages his affection for everything from drizzly Sundays to Marmite, that impossibly salty spread the Brits gobble up by the jar-full. But he dressed his adoration in a garb of gentle mockery.
That’s exactly howthe Brits like it. And it’s exactly what made the book so compulsively entertaining for the rest of us.
Bryson’s new book, “The Road to Little Dribbling,” follows much the same formula— and to similar effect. He ambles up and down picture-perfect country roads, gazes out from windswept coastal cliffs, drops in on old stone villages and generally pursues a path apparent only to him, recounting local anecdotes as he goes.
His travels take him to world-famous sites such as Stonehenge but also to places no right-minded tourists would visit — especially if they’ve read this book. Of Britain’s countryside, he writes, “It’s the world’s largest park, its the most perfect accidental garden.” But his book wouldn’t be any fun if he went only to the good parts.
The first place he visits, a grim postindustrial town called Eastleigh, “is directing all its economic energies into the making and drinking of coffee. There were essentially two types of shop in the town: empty shops and coffee shops.”
The next locale offers little more enticement: A terminally ill seaside town whose main claim to fame lies in being alliteratively denounced by a terminally ill king. “Bugger Bognor,” King George V allegedly exclaimed before expiring.
At another fading beach resort— Britain is full of them— Bryson recalls his first time diving into an English sea, an experience he likens to “running into liquid nitrogen.”
“Since that day, I have never assumed that anything is fun just because it looks like the English are enjoying themselves doing it, and mostly I have been right,” he observes dryly— and accurately.
Bryson seems to go out of his way to avoid actually interacting with the British. And when that fails, the result is typically a contest to determine who can be crankier. He spars epically with a McDonald’s cashier who scrambles his order, and he fantasizes about clubbing to death a dog-walker who refuses to clean up a freshly befouled trail.
Bryson is 64, and occasionally he can go too far in playing the curmudgeon. But he makes up for it in two ways that make him not only a palatable travel companion but a very nearly ideal one.
The first is that, like the British, he’s well-versed in the fine art of self-deprecation. Many, if not most, of the book’s innumerable gags are at his own expense, including the very first, when an automatic parking barrier comes crashing down on his head. It is, he writes, “something I don’t think I could have managed inmy younger, more alert years.”
The second is that Bryson’s capacity for wonder at the beauty of his adopted homeland seems to have only grown with time. Bryson grew up in Iowa and came to live in Britain accidentally: At the tail end of a college-break visit in 1973, he impulsively applied for a job at a sanitorium outside London and ended up falling in love with one of the nurses.
Britain is still his home four decades later, a period in which he went from lowly scribe at small-town British papers to best-selling travel writer. But he retains an outsider’s appreciation for a country that first struck him as “wholly strange ... and yet somehow marvelous.”
He marvels still: At Stonehenge, sure— “one of the most beautiful and extraordinary things ever created by humans.” But he’s at his best when writing about places you’ve probably never heard of.
In northern England’s Peak District, he stumbles upon “an enormous stone dam and reservoir, which stood in a silent landscape of wooded hills and heath.” And he has the site to himself. “It is a permanent astonishment to me how casually streaked with glory Britain is,” he writes. “If the Derwent dam were in Iowa, it would be on the state’s license plates. There would be campgrounds, an RV park, probably a large outlet center. Here it is anonymous and forgotten, a momentary diversion on a countryside amble.”
The book is full of such diversions. I’ve lived in Britain for two years, and I’ve tried to see as much of the place as I can. But I’ve visited only a handful among the dozens of sites that Bryson describes.
Some don’t even exist anymore. He ventures deep into a forest to find the elaborate estate where Alice Liddell— the real-life inspiration for “Alice in Wonderland”— lived out her final days as “an ill-tempered recluse” who “was mean to her servants.” But the house has vanished into the woodland.
Bryson turns uncharacteristically serious when he frets that much of what makes Britain so extraordinary could just as easily disappear. He rails against the impact of austerity policies that have uprooted the flower beds from village roundabouts and delayed the repair of crumbling national treasures. He despairs that his beloved countryside will be chewed up in the relentless race for development. Hedgerows, country churches and “sheep roaming over windswept fells,” he notes, can rarely justify their existence on economic grounds alone.
The book ends with a plea: As custodians of such a fine island, the British just need to look after it.
Britons may not take themselves too seriously. But I hope they take Bryson’s message to heart.