The Road to Little Dribbling

Mr Bryson is becoming something of a National Institution, or National Treasure, depending on your opinion. In the forty years of his marriage to his English wife he has embraced life on our Small Island with enthusiasm and generosity. The result of his love affair with Britain was ‘Notes from a Small Island’, which I was amazed to find out appeared twenty years ago. It was a big success – an outsider’s view of our nation, which somehow contained insider information. Perhaps only Clive James does the job as well as Bill Bryson – that gentle poking into of eccentricities to help us to see quite how bonkers we all are.

It was inevitable that Bill Bryson would be asked, or tempted, to return to his winning formula. He intimates that it was equal parts of publisher suggestion and his own motivation to lead him to write this second book. It is a sort of a state of the nation analysis, twenty years on, and a travelogue.

Bill Bryson is at his best when he is waxing lyrical about the glories of the British countryside. He goes to great lengths to point out how much we should be thankful for, and how much we do not appreciate enough. In these situations his outsider’s eyes are useful. He celebrates our National Parks (which, he points out, are not actually parks), he spends many a happy chapter extolling the wonders of our coastlines, and he gives special mention to the lovely country pubs, tea houses and Indian restaurants the length of our little islands.

There is a danger in such writing of falling into Alan Whicker territory, or the book reading just like a prolonged advert for the National Trust. Thankfully there are large doses of common sense along the way. He is not one of the Cream Tea drinking Stately Home visiting brigade, but equally he does not belittle them. Well, only a little bit.

His route for this book is approximately south to north, along the ‘Bryson Line’, taking many side trips to places of interest. He writes well about the history of the landscape, and if he does his own research he is very skilled at selecting little nuggets on very interesting information. He should be on Qi.

A large part of this book, however, is also bemoaning how Austerity Britain is losing so much that is valuable and beautiful. He is, of course, quite right. For a crowded island we have many areas of natural beauty and we lose them at our peril. However, he does go on a bit about this – there is a touch of the Victor Meldrew about him as he enters his sixties. It is right that we have people who love Britain so much, and if we all cared as much as Bill does, we would live in a much cleaner, more pleasant little island. There is a quite political end to his book, which will divide opinion and may divide his readers.

Bill Bryson is as funny as ever, and has a sharp eye for what is important. A second book about Britain is justified because of the time that has elapsed since his last, and the way he was disciplined in not returning to many of the places that he had been before.

Perhaps there is scope for him to write a whole book about travels in Scotland, which gets only twenty pages at the end.