The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain Book

I struggled to get through this one. Theroux came highly recommended by other travel writers, Bill Bryson and Rick Steves, so I was very disappointed. As the quotes below reveal, Paul Theroux has a gift for the beautiful turn-of-phrase and is occasionally insightful. However, far too much of "The Kingdom by the Sea" was filled with boring and highly repetitive material. I'll boil this down to two key gripes.

1. Theroux's book follows him on trip around the British coastline. He makes a commitment to do no sightseeing -- no castles, no museums. Instead, he intends to immerse himself in British culture. However, as a way of describing British culture, there are inherent flaws in the logic. First, this means he avoids major British cities, including London, Newcastle, Manchester, Oxbridge, etc. Missing out on these key cities (London!) means he fails to capture some essential qualities of the UK. Second, his sight-free tour of the coast means he spends most of his time at tacky, often dying seaside resorts, hardly an accurate depiction of England as a whole. In the final chapter, he writes a brief amalgam of all the resorts that would have sufficed to represent the rest of the highly repetitive descriptions. Theroux's departures from resorts (to Liverpool, Belfast, Ulster) are among the most interesting parts of the book. Reading 100 pages of boring material for 10 pages of valuable insight just isn't worth it.

2. Jeez, what a naive snob this guy is. At one point he writes, "Mine was not the breezy condescension of the traveler but a sense of puzzlement at the state of decay" (pg. 308). I can think of no words to describe his disposition better than "breezy condescension." Theroux turns up his nose at nearly all forms of mass culture and working class tastes. He is highly dismissive of elderly Brits preference for sea shanties and tea cozies. Likewise, he views railway buffs pleasure-riding of dying branch lines as self-indulgent and destructive. He naively finds the racial epithet "wog" cute and repeatedly refers to the prevalence of swastikas in graffiti and punk apparel as harmless. At times, Theroux's elitist disdain for the working class made the text almost unreadable. He is far too self-absorbed and that makes for highly uninteresting reading much of time.


On the other hand, Theroux paints a very powerful portrait of poverty and unemployment in the UK during the Falkland Islands era. His descriptions of tribal conflict in Ireland and struggling farmers in Scotland are vivid. As a portrait of the British Isles during the early 1980s, Theroux's book is compelling, but far from complete.


Quotes:
On riding the train along the British coastline from Dover to Folkestone ... "It was man's best machine traversing earth's best feature -- the train tracking in the narrow angle between vertical rock and horizontal water."

Speaking with Mr. Crouch, an aged worker about the imminent closing of a picturesque train line ... "At Hastings, he said, 'I'm glad I won't be around to see it.' English people of a certain class often said things like this, taking a satisfaction in the certainty of death, because dying was a way of avoiding the indignity of what they imagined to be a grim future..."

"[Going to the coast] was the poor person's way of going abroad -- standing at the seaside and staring at the ocean. It took a little imagination. I believed that that these people were fantasizing that they were over there on the watery horizon, at sea."