A SUGGESTIVE DANCE (The Kingdom by the Sea - Paul Theroux)

Member Name: Aang

Product:	The Kingdom by the Sea - Paul Theroux
Date:	19/08/00 (73 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A non-boring book about Britain

Disadvantages: None

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The Great Railway Bazaar is magic and so is this.

I wish I could write like Mr Theroux (father of Louis) because he has that way of describing bits of Britain that make you think : Gosh, that's just how it is (at least, if you're feeling in a Theroux-sort-of mood), and isn't it fascinating.

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MARGATE - "Margate had never been fashionable. It had never even been nice....

"Skinheads and chip-shops and rain...."

Theroux walks round Britain's coast (just occasionally taking a train) and describes the places he visits and the people he meets.

The year was 1982, the summer of the Falklands War.

DEAL - "a girl and a boy stopped me...

The girl said, 'Give me forty-five pence, will you?"

"...I said no...

"'He's a poof,'" the girl said, and they both laughed."

HASTINGS - "The town was too poor to be vulgar and it had enough friendly artists to avoid being philistine."

Theroux liked Hastings. And he enjoyed a chat with the artist John Bratby.

BEXHILL - "tea shops; semi-detached houses; pebbledash facades; no fun-fair visible; a largely elderly population of shuffling Tories."

THE EAST SUSSEX COAST - "The English aristocracy had nearly always been recruited from the ranks of flatterers, cut-throats, boyfriends...

"So it was not so strange that this blue valley on the coast of East Sussex was populated by wine-bibbing lords who had formerly been Marxist union men..."

BRIGHTON - "Brighton had the face of an old tart and a very brief appeal...Brighton was full of disappointed and bad-tempered visitors."

HOVE - "Hove was low spirits and lawns."

WORTHING - "It was a breezy, villagey place
, with tree-lined streets, and like the folks who lived in it, Worthing was a little old, a little lame, and a little stout, but it still had sparkle."

A complement indeed!

BOGNOR REGIS - "frenzied when it was busy and desolate when empty...

Bognor was not all bad...Bognor was restful, the front was windswept and bare, the pier was shut, it had no pretensions..."

LITTLEHAMPTON - "The sort of place where people did little but water their plants..."

BOURNMOUTH - "pretty parks and ugly buildings."

LYME REGIS - "a continuous line of traffic being squeezed between tea shops and coaching inns..."

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Theroux doesn't just visit England, he also visits:

CORNWALL - "The loathing for tourists and outsiders was undisguised."

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And WALES - "Wales ... seemed like an earlier version of England - upright and antique and dusty and church-going, with all the colour schemes wrong."

Theroux likes the Welsh.

"Welsh politeness was soft-hearted and smiling. Even LLANELLI's Skinheads were well-behaved, and the youths with swastikas on their leather jackets, and bleached hair and earrings, or green hair and T-shirts saying Anarchy - even they seemed sweet-natured."

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And Northern Ireland:

BELFAST - "I knew at once that Belfast was an awful city. It had a bad face - mouldering buildings, tough-looking people, a visible smell, too many fences..."

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AND SCOTLAND:

EDINBURGH- "a handsome place still, a city of black crags and old solemn tenements of slate rising to a castle that looked like a dark drum on a cliff...It was the most beautiful city in Britain a
nd one of the most beautiful in Europe."

GLASGOW - Theroux finds Glasgow peaceful, even pretty.

"The city looked dignified."

But, Theroux does notice one less dignified aspect of people and trains in the Glasgow area: "the men who sat six to a table with a bottle of vodka and twenty cans of Tartan Ale; the families sitting in a nest of newspapers and sandwich wrappers and plastic bags... the children screaming, 'How much farva!' and 'I can hear funda!'...an atmosphere of sour mayonnaise and stale cigarette smoke...."

Theroux like the Scots!

"I was reluctant to leave Scotland; I had liked nearly everyone I had met."

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Theroux is at his best when describing the people he meets.

" 'We do bed and breakfast,' Margaret Skeat said.

"Vesta Skeat was thirteen and sneaked lipstick when her mother was not looking...

" 'Is that all the clobber you have?" she said, standing in the doorway of my room...

"Her mother screamed her name. Vesta said softly, 'Shut up, you silly cow,' and then winked at me..."

Theroux stayed mainly in Bed and Breakfasts, which gave him the opportunity to study real people's homes.

"I was often warmed by a small thrill in following the younger landladies up four flights to the tiny room at the top of the house."

Theroux stayed in a B&B in Southport with Herb, out of work and suspicious, and Trish, who tells the American Theroux, "I find I can really relax with Americans."

Trish likes getting down on all fours. A lot.
To shampoo the carpet, or sweep the carpet, or pick up toys from the floor...

"Trish was frequently on her hands and knees when I was sitting in the room...It was as if, in ape terms, she was 'presenting' to me - the
bum-show that matters so much in baboon society..."

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Theroux gives us his view of English life.

Theroux visits Butlins, in MINEHEAD -
"The more I saw of Butlin's the more it resembled English life; it was very close to reality in its narrowness, its privacies and its pleasures....

"electronic games were easier than sports and eating junk food had become another recreation. No one seemed to notice how plain the buildings were....

"I went to the talent show auditions in the Gaiety Revue Theatre. A girl of eight did a suggestive dance to a lewd pop song... Most of the parents were elsewhere- playing one-armed bandits and drinking beer."


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And what does Theroux (an American) really think about the English?

It's good news and bad news. You can call that balanced, I suppose.

The English- "Person to person, I had found them truthful and efficient and humane..."

So far so good.

"But anonymity made them lazy, dishonest and aggressive.... over the phone they were unhelpful and frequently rude..."

"If I had only one word to describe the expression of England's face I would have said: insulted.

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On occasions, Theroux was forced to stay in large hotels rather than B&B's. He gives us an insight into our tourism industry.

"It was hard to distinguish hotels in England from prisons or hospitals. Most of them were run with the same indifference or cruelty and were equally uncomfortable."

Actually, Theroux did like some of the small hotels he stayed in. "The English do small things well and big things badly."

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Sometimes Theroux simply notes down what he
sees, without making any obvious comment.

ST IVES - "The graffiti at St Ives station said, 'Wogs ought to be hit about the head with the utmost severity' and under this, 'Niggers run amok in London - St Ives next!' and in a different hand: 'Racism is a social disease - you should see a doctor.'"

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There is often a serious side to what Theroux writes. In Bristol he visits the St Pauls district, where race riots had left streets of gutted buildings. He talks to an Indian sociologist about West Indians.

"In the course of a generation or two the parents' authority had been weakened and the children had stopped submitting. In fact the children had become British," writes Theroux.

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British children? Theroux has lots to say, including this:

"one mother (English), looking at the tormented face of her wet baby, grew very cold and sarcastic.

" 'Someone's going to have a warm bottom in a minute!' she said.

"The baby groaned like a starving monkey and tensed its fingers, indicating fear and frustration.

The Welsh people on the train stared at this behaviour and thought: The English!"

In Southport, Theroux meets Jason.

"Even Jason, who was 12, was lacking in hope. he was a bright boy but he said he was in the 'B' class. 'All the posh woons are in the 'A' class. Teacher's pets and that. He said he was planning to leave school when he was 16.

" 'What would your mother say about that?'

" 'Me moom don't care.'

Theroux feels sorry for some of the children of Anglesey.

"Anglesey...was all council flats and uncut grass, barking dogs and broken stone walls. I felt sorry for the children, kicking tin cans, their h
ands in their pockets and their hair blowing, dreaming of being plasterers."

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Theroux worries about the poor. He considers that in Britain "directors were treated absurdly well, and workers badly."

How true. The Sunday Times recently pointed out that the bosses of Britain's top 100 companies earn on average £1,700,000 per year. And are they doing a good job? BT shareholders have recently seen their shares drop about 60% (taking interest payments into account), yet Sir Peter Bonfield, the boss at the time of writing, has had his salary increased. His total pay for the year is £1.7 million. Tony Blair's Britain, where the gap between the rich and poor continues to widen! And BT cut me off the first time I wrote that. (BT have cut me off three times while writing this op.)

At one point in the book, Theroux makes a prediction about the future of Britain. He believes Britain would become a "a wilderness in which most people lived hand to mouth, and the rich would live like princes."

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Theroux worries about violence.

"I no longer felt that place-names like Taunton or Exeter or Bristol were evocative of anything but graffiti-covered walls....

"The graffiti suggested that England was changing into a ....more violent place."

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'Who the heck does Theroux think he is?' you may ask, as your blood pressure rises.

Well, he's American, and he admits that all is not well in America!

He lived for five years in Africa, working, I think, for the peace Corps.

He taught English in Singapore. He did a lot of travelling: China, South America.....

He lived for some years in London.

And he admits that when he's critical, the problem may be with him!

He wri
tes: "Morcambe was wrapped around the edge of a dirty sea, scowling, its blackened terraces and hotels reminiscent of certain fierce churches - all spikes and shadows...

"I imagined day-trippers getting off the train and taking one look and bursting into tears. But of course most people at Morcambe were enjoying themselves in the drizzle, and the fault was mine, not theirs."

Well, normal people like drizzle, don't they?

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And, it's important to note that Theroux LOVED some parts of coastal Britain.

THE NORTH WEST COAST OF SCOTLAND - "This was the most spectacular coastline I had seen so far in Britain - huger than Cornwall, darker than Wales, wilder than Antrim...

"It was a splendid ride to Mallaig - one of the most scenic railway journeys in the world....

"That night I stared out of the window at the freakish mountains of Skye. They were sharp pointed , fantastic and high like peaks in dragon stories...

"Skye...it was a surprise and a pleasure to find a place I wished to return to....I wanted to come here again with someone I loved and say 'Look.'

ST ANDREWS - "There was not a town its size in Britain to compare with St Andrews...the white stone ruins and the brown stone buildings perched on the rocky cliffs of a wide bay....like a lively cloister with the roof off..."

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Who would have thought a book about travel in Britain could be so revealing; and such fun. It doesn't make you laugh out loud like Bill Bryson, but it is entertaining. He is critical, but that's how it should be. Britain could do with a bit of criticism.

And one day, Historians will use this book to study Britain, much as Historians have used the Domesday Book.

No book can ever be perfect. Theroux misses out one or two really n
ice places (round about Dumfries and Galloway for example) but never mind.

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Great Railway Bazaar must have tempted a number of people to set off for the exotic and mysterious East. This book, Kingdom by the Sea, may tempt a few people to try bed and breakfasting on Britain's grey little coast, and they may meet the sort of weird and wonderful people that Mr Theroux met. Do buy it if you like travel books.

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