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I highly recommend this book for anyone who likes fine writing, England, travel, walking tours, people. I love England and I love Paul Theroux so I have only wonderful things to say about this book. I'm there with him as he walks the coast of England.I'm also a people person, as is he, and the things he writes about touch my soul.
Even if it's not all peaches and cream, it's what he felt, and you can't help but feel like a traveling companion. It's a great read. This is a terrific book. The author is simply sharing HIS observations of life along the British coastal cities and towns.
I actually found myself growing depressed as a read his dreary memoir of what could have been a fascinating journey, and that's just not the sort of experience I was looking for. Imagine someone touring the coastlines of America, especially the rust belt, and then presenting this as a valid exercise in seeing all there was to see of the place. It was a year mired in an era that represented both a relative low point in modern British history and a also a stepping stone to present-day recovery. Paul Theroux said straight off "no castles" making this his mantra and meaning he was concerned with discovering Britain of the moment rather than of the past, which is a fine and worthy undertaking, but as I slogged through chapter after chapter of his complaints about damp and dank boardinghouses, slovenly humanity and bad food, I kept wishing he jolly would include the occasional castle, battlefield, cathedral or treasure house.
This book was not as much fun as I expected it to be, namely because Mr. What could have been a travel journal that uplifted and enthralled instead became a melancholy series of bellicose dreariness. Yes, Thatcher's Britain was a tottering welfare state that had seen better days, but did Paul Theroux, who cuts the Third World every conveyable bit of slack when he visits it, really, truly HAVE to always see England's glass as half empty. Theroux (whom I seriously began to dislike here) seemed to take any excuse to disdain the British as a people, a culture, and a nation.
Theroux made his trek by foot, bus, train and sometimes private car (he was brazen enough to hitchhike on occasion) in 1982, the year that gave Britons the Falklands War, a homicidal madman in Yorkshire, a threatened transit strike, and the joyous birth of a presumably future king, Charles and Diana's son, William. Four stars for a number of introductions to interesting people Theroux met along the way, especially those old-timers born in the nineteenth-century, but without them popping up here an there as they did, this was barely a three-star read. He chose to visit the most run-down of locales and then ballishly complained about them, and in so doing presented the image that his experiences were representative of an entire nation as a whole. This is just about what happened in The Kingdom By The Sea.
At the same time, he unflinchingly relates every detail of his experience, every rude comment, every unpleasant encounter. My England is nothing like Theroux's, but then, I wasn't there for 17 years, I didn't tour the coast, and I am not Paul Theroux.
The more unpleasant encounters only served to make the pleasant ones more so. I recently re-read "Kingdom", while thinking about a bicycle tracing some of the ground covered by Theroux, and what struck me was how much there was that Theroux truely liked about his trip, the things he saw, and the people he met.
Paul Theroux's travel book soften being out strong opinions in readers- particulrly those who have visited a place he has written about. What makes for interesting reading is the minutia, the detail that makes my trip different from your trip.
"Kingdom By The Sea" is for me, at least, a thouroughly enjoyable tour, a look into the British and into Theroux, and as always, a terrific piece of writing by one of the modern masters. Many of the most critical seem to focus on a few details and miss the overall tenor of the piece.As Theroux makes quite clear in this book, he loves the English seacoast, and he met many warm people along the way.
As he notes, most travel writing is boring; we went to Egypt, we saw the pyramids, et cetera.
These aren't "the English." Poor Theroux. The old resorts have become God's Waiting Room and battlegrounds for the skinhead urban poor. Chapters go by without him seeing a child, or a real family, only potty old people who hate foreigners. Theroux's interesting but illstarred plan was to meet the English by travelling around the coast, on foot and by train. Read his fine book on China instead. He was twenty years too late. Real English, real conversations. About a month into this disaster it's becoming obvious that even the lower middle class have abandoned the gray, chilly English coastal towns for cheap jumbo jets to sunny climes.
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