WISH YOU WEREN'T HERE!
The Black Cat Anthology
of Travel Humour
Edited by Cecil Kuhne
More Arts Stories
Black Cat, 288 pages, $18.95
THE ANGRY ISLAND
Hunting the English
By A. A. Gill
Orion, 288 pages, $39.95
Wish You Weren't Here! The Black Cat Anthology of Travel Humour is not about commercial travel. No Caribbean all-inclusive resorts. No family trips to Disneyland/World. No Arizona midwinter golf holidays. No spa destinations.
Instead, this collection of essays from veteran travel writers is rife with adventure, adversity and human folly in far-off, complicated places.
Edited by Dallas adventure-travel writer Cecil Kuhne, this anthology pulls together some of the world's best living - and dead - travel writers, including Mark Twain and E. B. White. Alive or dead, Kuhne's writers deliver brutally honest and concise observations on people, places and things.
In Boats and Planes, the misanthropic Pete McCarthy meets with a series of frustrating delays while travelling from Ireland to England and back again. While some people merely stop at roadside attractions to sate their curiosity, Sarah Vowell takes an Assassination Vacation around the United States. In The Bus Plunge Highway, Tom Miller, who fears plunging South American buses, still rides in these questionably maintained vehicles along the west coast of that continent.
Bill Bryson's amusing essay, Neither Here Nor There, details an early 1990s Paris trip during which the overtly curious Bryson stumbles upon the famous English-language bookstore Shakespeare & Co. Bryson surmises that since it's on the banks of the Seine and in the shadow of Notre Dame, its location must push its rent into the stratosphere. "Anywhere else in the world, Shakespeare & Co. would be a souvenir emporium, selling die-cast models of the cathedral, Quasimodo ashtrays, slide strips, postcards, and Ooh-La-La T-shirts. ... How it managed to escape this dismal fate is a miracle."
P. J. O'Rourke's sardonic musings during a Land Rover promotional road trip from Pakistan to India, in the late 1990s, is another reason to buy this book. "The crowding is extreme, but you get used to it. You get used to a lot of things in India: naked ascetics; 100 sheep being herded through downtown traffic; costumed girls parading in single file linked by electric wires, one carrying a car battery and the rest with blue fluorescent tubes sticking out of their headdresses."
In Would You Belize?, Christopher Buckley finds himself immersed in a Belizean eco-tour with the kind of people who shouldn't be away from their restrictive diet routine. "The colonically inclined California couple ... introduced themselves to everyone we came across as 'Vegans.' Watching them describe their draconian dietary requirements to the mystified peasant folks who cooked our meals in remote hamlets was a memorable part of the trip; you have not truly lived until you have witnessed a tank-topped blond from Los Angeles explain the evils of chicken to an emaciated Central American."
While the American and Irish writers delivered the goods, pompous English writers like Tony Hawks, Nigel Barley and Eric Newby did not. If A. A. Gill were writing this review, he'd say it was because they're emotionally repressed Englishmen.
This leads us to Gill's manifesto of English-bashing, written with the panache only an Edinburgh-born, London-raised hellion could muster against his fiendish English overlords. In The Angry Island: Hunting the English, Gill's satiric sword pokes from his journalist and critic perch at London's Sunday Times toward the people directly around him.
Gill admits that his book is a series of observations drawn from living among the English. "I'd better come clean. You may have suspected I don't like the English. One at a time, I don't mind them. I've loved some of them. A lot of my friends were born here between the cliff and the wall. It's their collective persona I can't warm to. The lumpen and louty, coarse, unsubtle, beady-eyed, beefy-bummed herd of England."
Gill's outrageous thesis surmises that what makes the English impermeably English is anger. "Collectively and individually, the English are angry about something. The pursed lip and the muttered expletives, the furious glance and the beetled brow are England's national costume. A simmering, unfocused lurking anger is the collective cross England bears with ill grace. ... Anger has made the English an ugly race."
To balance their angry disposition, Gill says the English also have an admirable achievement: "Their heroic self-control. It's the daily struggle of not giving in to your natural inclination to run amok with a cricket bat, to spit and bite in a crowded tea-room, that I admire most in the English. It's not what they are, but their ability to suppress what they are, that's great about the English."
If Gill's extended glance at his English neighbours were just about their anger, it could be a dull couple of hundred pages. But because Gill deconstructs everything about the English, from their faces, to their voices, to their love of pets, to class, to their propensity for drink, sport and gardening, to political correctness and nostalgia - mostly for "Empire" and prewar architecture - it reveals much, much more.
The English hangover we're familiar with in Canada is the queue. "The English queue because they have to. If they didn't they'd kill each other. The pressure of boiling anger in the average post office is only contained by the shared knowledge that this is as fair as can possibly be arranged in this life. They would rip the head off of Mahatma Gandhi if he tried to renew his TV licence ahead of them."
Gill's wicked dissection of Old Blighty's inhabitants is borderline: Either he really despises the English or he's created a very astute analysis of the people with whom he rubs shoulders everyday. Of course it's the latter, yet after a series of screeds that had this Scots-Canadian laughing out loud, you're still left wondering. A. A. Gill is the Scottish P. J. O'Rourke.
Sure, an educated person's analysis alarm goes off when another group, especially an ethnic group, is referred to as "they." Yet Gill isn't promoting hatred, ethnic cleansing or even slapping English bottoms with a cricket bat. He merely does what he usually does for a living: He observes, and criticizes where necessary.
D. Grant Black is a Regina journalist, travel writer and editor.
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