BRYSON UNDERACHIEVES!!! (Down Under - Bill Bryson)

Member Name: GNU BOY

Product:	Down Under - Bill Bryson
Date:	06/02/01 (37 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Packed with information and one-liners.

Disadvantages: It's just not that funny! No depth of Bill's character. NOT AS GOOD AS PREVIOUS EFFORTS.

What’s this? Bryson underachieving? In short, that is exactly what he does with this, his latest embellishment. I write as someone who has loved, simply adored, reading his other books, in particular ‘The Lost Continet’ and ‘Mother Tongue’, so imagine my surprise when I found myself churning through an almost heavy workload of reading.
The great thing about Bryson’s books has always been the fact that you can pick them up at any time and in any place, and chuckle to yourself, even feel warm in the fact that you are sharing his experiences. All avid readers of Bill’s work (you even feel like you can call him Bill) recognise the basic human failings and pleasures that he writes of, and yet this book simply does not show them.
Everything begins well, with the usual sprinkling of Bill-esque facts, but the intimate human picture never really emerges. There are the classic paragraph endings that make Bill’s books so funny, with simple one-liners that, more often than not, require the reader to work out the joke rather than him explain it. However, there is no cohesion, and you begin to wish he would just pack his bags and go to a funnier country. It really is like that; I know that Australia is as exciting as anywhere in the world, and yet reading this fills me with a grey image of the country.
I read all of Bryson’s articles in The Times during the Sydney Olympics, and they were enough to justify the price of the newspaper alone. He got down to the feelings and the failings of what was a wonderful global spectacle. Why then, has he failed to do this with this latest book? Perhaps he has believed his own press and become complacent. This has happened to other writers of his generation. Or perhaps it was something as simple as the fact that the font of the text is different to all his previous books. Ridiculous as this may sound, it is almost as if his voice has changed; after all, to the reader his voi
ce IS the text. In this case, it is no fault of Bill’s, but in fact a different perception by the reader.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed this book and would advise you to read it. However, it is not Bryson in the traditional sense of the word. Gone is the week or so you spend in his presence as you read his book (including reading most of the jokes two or three times over), and here is a book rich in information but scant in character. If you are unfamiliar with Bryson, read ‘Notes From a Big Country’ and go from there. If you read this first you could taint your image of him forever. Don’t worry Bill, I still love you. But you must do better...

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