By Nick Stark
FANS of Bill Bryson, rejoice. The Anglophile American who quite literally wrote the book on the charms and foibles of the British Isles in his classic book Notes from A Small Island, has done it again with his latest love letter to his adopted country, The Road To Little Dribbling.
Bryson landed in England from his native Iowa in 1973 and was bowled over the by the country. On a whim he got a job at a psychiatric hospital, met a nurse there, and married her, thus beginning a lifelong love affair with Great Britain, where he’s lived on and off for decades and to which he paid homage in Notes from a Small Island (1996), his first British travelogue.
After a spell back in America, during which he wrote, among other works, A Walk in the Woods, Bryson revisited Britain to walk what he dubs the Bryson line – a not-quite-straight route from Bognor Regis on the South Coast to Cape Wrath in northernmost Scotland, to observe critique and delight in Britain’s may idiosyncratic ways.
It’s not at all necessary to read Bryson’s first book to enjoy his latest, but you will miss out on the following observation, which got this reviewer hooked on Bryson’s eye and style in the first place: “If you mention in the pub that you intend to drive from, say, Surrey to Cornwall, a distance that most Americans would happily go to get a taco, your companions will puff their cheeks, look knowingly at each other, and blow out air as if to say, ‘Well, now that’s a bit of a tall order,’” …“‘There’s the Great West steam rally at Little Dribbling this weekend,’ somebody from across the room will add, strolling over to join you because it’s always pleasant to bring bad motoring news.
‘There’ll be 375,000 cars all converging on the Little Chef roundabout at Upton Dupton. We once spent 11 days in a tailback there, and that was just to get out of the car park. No, you want to have left when you were still in your mother’s womb, or preferably while you were spermatozoa, and even then you won’t find a parking space beyond Bodmin.’”
For me, this is marvelous stuff, precisely because Bryson has the eye of an outsider but such a love for British culture and countryside that we laugh with him, rather than raise our eyebrows at his censure.
Twenty years later, as he is entering what he fondly calls his “dotage”, Bryson seems merely to have sharpened both his heart and his claws. He remains devoted to Britain’s eccentric place names, pastimes and manners. He delights in the manicured majesty of Britain’s open spaces, while fulminating against the litter bugs and careless planners who may yet destroy them.
Among the places Bryson finds and ponders in The Road to Little Dribbling are Bognor Regis, the New Forest, the London Underground and the little remembered model community of Motopia. He brings readers along as he walks with his trusty Ordnance Survey map in hand through the English countryside visiting well- and lesser-known museums and parks. In this book you will discover why the Himalayan mountain is named after George Everest. And just why London is the best city in the world. Or why Oxford is the most pleasant and improved city in Britain; why Lytham is the best small town in the north, and why Morecambe boasts Britain’s most beautiful bay.
Although Bryson’s favor is soft and warm and his disfavor is more often gently mocking than vituperative, on occasion the pecular madness of the Brits can really set him off. No words are minced or punches pulled where he finds social decline; he rails against indifferent British shopkeepers and indulges in more than one violent fantasy. However, the bulk of his love/hate relationship with Britain falls squarely on the love side. Anglophiles will find Bryson’s field notes equally entertaining and educational, and armchair travelers will enjoy the jaunt immensely. A thoroughly recommend read.
The Road to Little Dribbling by Brill Bryson. Hardcover 400 pages. Doubleday, Jan. 2016. ISBN: 0385539282
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