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Good Reading : February 2016
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GOOD READING FEBRUARY 2016 60 TRAVEL WOM word of mouth The Road to Little Dribbling Bill Bryson Just over 20 years ago, travel writer and American expat Bill Bryson published a book about England, the country in which he has lived since the mid 1970s. Notes from a Small Island provided an insight – often gently mocking but unmistakably fond – into the foibles and endearing quirks of the British and their nation. In this latest book he uses the fact that he is about to become a British citizen as the pretext to do another tour of the nation, with the intention of avoiding the same places that he wrote about in the previous book. The sites that he visits in many instances aren’t those on the tourist trails, but he always extracts fascinating facts from them. In West Kensington he enters the home of the now largely forgotten 19th-century artist Frederic Leighton, whose relationship with a much younger woman named Ada Pullen was said to have been George Bernard Shaw’s inspiration for Pygmalion. And Bryson tells us about the 19th-century scandal involving the gay brothel of Cleveland Street, London, frequented by high-society men and where a grandson of Queen Victoria was rumoured to have been a customer. He also recounts the story of the magnificent – but largely overlooked – Holloway College in Virginia Water near London, one of the grandest buildings built anywhere in the world in the 19th century, and which is still an arresting sight. It was designed by William Crossland, who stopped working as an architect after he hooked up with an actress 18 years his junior and fathered three children with her, all the while maintaining his first family. This devotion to both wife and mistress depleted his body and his finances, and he died alone and impoverished in London in 1908. A similar tale appeared in Notes from a Small Island, where the author recounted the precipitate fall of retail magnate Harry Selfridge, who went off the rails after he showed excessive interest in a pair of showgirls, squandered his fortune and died in poverty. Bryson seems to be intrigued by tales of men of significant achievement and solid reputations who dissipate their fortunes while succumbing to their libidinous impulses, and his telling of these reversals of fortune is fascinating. We learn that London consists of nearly 40 per cent green space, that Alice Liddell (the real-life inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s fictional creation) lost two sons in World War I and in her old age became a recluse who was nasty to her servants, and that if you tried to visit all the medieval churches in England alone – never mind Scotland or Wales – at the rate of one a week, it would take you 308 years. In between the facts, of course, Bryson harrumphs over the price of pub lunches (continually but hilariously, in a way that no-one else could do without boring you), rude shop assistants, dog owners who fail to pick up the excrement of their pets (the story of how he fantasises about killing one particularly bumptious dog owner is uproariously funny), dwindling forests and civic stinginess – which has resulted in the demise of low-cost enhancements to public places, such as flower beds on roundabouts, despite the UK’s unquestionable increase in wealth over the last 40 years. He even laments the demise of a bad restaurant – whose food was only ever coloured brown or black – of which he had grown unaccountably fond. This book is a delight. Not only is it filled with fascinating facts about the UK that Bryson turns into great anecdotes, but the author’s skill as a master stylist of humour makes the book a treat for readers who revel in the deft use of language. ★★★★★ Doubleday $39.99 Reviewed by Tim Graham
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