'The Road to Little Dribbling' suffers from, to borrow Alfred Kazin's devastating criticism of H.L. Unfortunately, being back out on the road seems to have brought out the worst in him. That makes sense, since as he has aged, Bryson has shifted from his early travel narratives - such as 'In a Sunburned Country' and 'A Walk in the Woods,' with their beautiful comic flights - toward books that are equally superb but more heavily based in research, like 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' and 'The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid.' ('The most iconic structure on the Settle-to-Carlisle line is Ribblehead Viaduct,' goes one representative and unchallengeable line.) The book is best when Bryson latches onto their forgotten local histories - the life of the bureaucrat who gave Mount Everest its name, for instance, or the charming story of an eccentric Nobel laureate who anonymously took a job as a London gardener. This allows him to visit dozens of small, out-of-the-way places, from Bognor Regis to Cape Wrath. The organizational principle he follows is a neat invention that he denominates the Bryson line, 'the farthest you could travel in a straight line without crossing salt water.' Now, 20 years on and closing in on citizenship, Bryson decides to explore his adopted homeland again. 'The Road to Little Dribbling' is a sequel to 'Notes from a Small Island,' which came out in 1995 and recounted with wry curiosity the Iowan's first encounters with a country that would soon give him both a wife and a career in journalism. It diminishes the book - the first of his career, for me, which is only an equivocal pleasure. 'We live in a world that has practically no appreciation for quality, tradition, or classiness,' he writes early on, and virtually every page thereafter offers some variation on that glum assessment. Alas, 'The Road to Little Dribbling,' his new account of travels around England (often by rail, in fact), has crossed it, the author's tone for the first time no longer so much curmudgeonly as incurably sour. Until now, the wonderful American writer Bill Bryson has always stayed on the right side of that line, consistently a nostalgist, never a pessimist. You have to be careful when you look backward. The rails were what made it easier to cast light onto all the injustices of dim and distant places. Of course, it was also a time when 5-year-olds worked in factories.
A simpler era, the feeling went, beer and accents stronger, and people moving only at the pace a horse could take them. In the 1880s, the English experienced an intense collective wistfulness for the period before 1850, which was the year that railroads had finally connected the country. The world is always in decline if you want it to be.
0 kommentar(er)
