"Notes From A Small Island" sees Bill Bryson travelling around Britain, mocking, admiring and denouncing it with equal verve and humour.
Bill Bryson’s Notes From A Small Island sees the travel writer and humourist making a tour around Britain before he leaves it to return to the United States, where he was born. As with his other works, such as The Lost Continent and Notes From A Big Country, Bryson’s obvious affection for the nation, and his devastating wit, coexist with his serious criticisms of social and architectural changes.
Double Vision
Notes From A Small Island rather cleverly interlaces an account of Bryson’s farewell trip around Britain with anecdotes from his very first visit to the UK, when he was a student in the 1970s. His stories from the past encompass dreary boarding houses, strikes in the newspaper industry, lunatics from the local hospital wandering around Virginia Water and what now seems the Edenic price of 13p for a pint of beer. This narrative double vision allows him to comment on Britain by comparing it to modern Europe and America, but also to its own recent past.
History Just Lying Around
His comments are not all a genial and cheery as Bryson’s public image might lead one to believe. Though his prose is always entertaining and amusing, he is obviously extremely depressed by the cavalier attitude he finds British people taking to their architectural heritage. He warns that Britain’s comparative richness in historical buildings and archaeological sites has bred a complacent assumption that each individual case doesn’t need protecting to the utmost – the country’s heritage is being “nibbled” into oblivion.
Bryson has never been fond of chain stores (he criticises their ubiquity in The Lost Continent as well), but he becomes particularly furious in Notes From A Small Island when describing how they take over provincial high streets, stripping out the lower stories and replacing them with plate glass and brightly coloured plastic. When he gives specific examples, it’s difficult to dissent from the point.
National Character
Though he denounces their slapdash attitude to conservation, Bryson expresses affection for what he sees as the British character. The ability to wait in queues, the relishing of small pleasures, an intoxicating inventiveness in the matter of places name and continual flashes of humour all come in for admiration.
Bryson is a keen observer, one who has lived long enough in Britain to speak with some accuracy, but not so involved with the culture that he overlooks its many absurdities. Both his fury and his humour are well worth the time it takes to read and then reread them.
