Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This comic travelogue-cum-love letter to Britain was a calculated ploy by a bestselling author to make its core readership feel good about themselves. Because praise from an American, more than from any other kind of foreigner, is what Middle Englanders most like to hear. The ploy worked: the book sold 2 million copies and was reissued twenty years later. I thumbed through it when it first appeared and found it amusing if patchy. Returning to it now I had the same reaction, only more so.

Bryson’s brand of humour consists of latching onto a cultural oddity and exploring all its comic possibilities, with heavy doses of exaggeration for effect. At times this works very well, as when, at a hotel in Dorset, he riffs on the absurdly ornate language that upscale restaurants began in the ’90s to use in their menus, and then addresses his waiter with similar floridity. (Did he really do so? It doesn’t matter because the passage is deliriously funny.) At other times the effect is laboured. I found the laugh-out-loud parts fewer as the book progresses, a trait that reminded me of Bryson’s first book, The Lost Continent, about a trip along the backroads of America.

Travel books have to do something more than romanticize or poke fun (including at oneself) if they are going to go the distance. Bryson does offer insights – asking questions that the English don’t because “it’s always been like this” – but the one that lingers most is his admission that Paul Theroux was much more adept than he at striking up illuminating conversations with train passengers. Bryson records very few interesting (as opposed to comical) exchanges indeed. And he probably made a mistake by journeying in the autumn, as the repeated image of the rain-soaked author, bumbling along desolate streets muttering sarcasms, wears thin by the half-way stage. Well-informed meditations on Blackpool and Durham enliven the latter chapters, but the whole adventure peters out and little of it lingers in the mind.




View all my reviews