Books

Travel writing is one of the best forms of literature, but as Paul Theroux points out, one that can be done badly if the author is not careful. English Journey has not been done badly and is a gem in its own right as a piece of travel writing but the fact that its was written in 1933 adds a fancinating historical dimension to Priestley’s tarvel around England by ‘motor coach’ which he describes as,

“They are voluptuous, sybaritic, of doubtful morality.”

Never has a coach been so eloquently painted in the reader’s mind. Moreover, with all the human touches that make you realise you are learning more about the author than about the place being visited,

“I spent the next day, which was fine and warm, at Bournville. There were several good reasons for doing this. To begin with, I was interested in the manufacture of chocolate, having bought and eaten in my time great quantities of the stuff, and having several times, when I was about ten tried unsuccessfully to make it myself.”

The book does more than present big adjectives and quirky childhood anecdotes. Priestly considers the fate of the industrial class and the economic state of Britain, post the Great War (1914-1918) in an insightful way by stepping out of middle-class London and right into the lives of the British working class.

This is a delightful read, better than Theroux’s (normally my favorite travel writer) rather turgid English travel writing, The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain, penned in 1982.

For a great tale about the British Empire, the founding of Hong Kong and the opium trade, look no further than James Clavell’s historical novel, Tai-Pan, the perfect distraction at the moment to the daily commute into Waterloo.

The main character is a Scottish merchant called Dirk Struan, whose tale is interwoven beautifaully with a historical and economical narrative about life in The Orient in Victorian times.

One evening while at home in Maidenhead, I was looking for a book to read and came across a collection of Penguin books, with faded orange spines, that had almost been bleached yellow by fifty years of sunlight. I don’t know why I didn’t discover it before (…but then that perhaps is one of the joys of reading…) but I came across ‘The Woman in White‘, a wonderful story written in varying narratives by a great clutch of characters, most memorable being the Napoleonic villain, Count Fosco. I almost wanted to read it again but now I am intrigued by what ‘Moonstone‘ holds in store…