Kingdom by the Sea (Essential Modern Classics) (Collins Modern Classics)

Product Information

Seeping up through the bricks and burning in little blue points of flame, all in the cracks between the bricks. Indeed Harry has grown a lot over these two months, finding his kingdom by the sea and aching to stay forever. In the Scottish city of Aberdeen, he finds the oil industry almost entirely manned by young single men with no hobbies.

The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain by Paul Theroux is in the Top Ten Books about Britain, Britishness, and the Brits. He won the Smarties Prize in 1989 for Blitzcat and the Guardian Award in 1990 for The Kingdom by the Sea. He is travelling at the time of the Falkland’s War (‘this Falkland’s business’ as the people he meets are wont to say).This, certainly, was one of the most wonderful gifts of my life, and remains a favorite of a genre to which I am now addicted. Theroux also casually throws in the phrase that he didn't want to get "duffled," a phrase he himself coined in the Railway Bazaar. What starts out as a fairly conventional love story finishes as a ghost tale, blending the horror of war with the sepulchral chill of the supernatural. It was 1982, the summer of the Falkland Islands War, and the birth of the royal heir, Prince William - and the ideal time, Theroux found, to surprise the British into talking about themselves.

In some trivial ways it was, but to an alien it seemed entirely irregular and unpredictable, changing from day to day. There are some wonderful moments that struck notes with me -- for instance an encounter with Jonathan Rabin, who told me once during a signing event that he and Theroux were friends and often shared galleys before final publication.Harry pushes on with a wisdom well beyond his years, even as his country fights for its own existence. Cumbrian shepherd Ralph Edwards disturbs the hidden grave of an extraterrestrial and thereby involves his village in the last stages of an interplanetary war. His first published book The Machine Gunners (1975) which won him the Carnegie Medal is set in World War Two when a group of children living on Tyneside retrieve a machine-gun from a crashed German aircraft. Margaret Thatcher, the then prime minister, decided that life cannot continue to be what it was for the British.

Harry and his dog Don take off down the beach looking for better places to live, and they always find them, that is, when they are not finding trouble. Here, he traveled clockwise around the coast of the UK, covering England, Wales, then Northern Ireland, then back for Scotland and the rest of England. During his travels by train, he mourns the closings and threatened closings of all the small branch lines that reached so deep into the countryside and coast. While I found it interesting to hear what the locals were saying about the military developments, it also made me uneasy and reminded me of current wars and strife and the fearmongering going on right now. He went to the local Grammar School and then studied Fine Art at Durham University, and Sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art in London.He naively finds the racial epithet "wog" cute and repeatedly refers to the prevalence of swastikas in graffiti and punk apparel as harmless. It's an interesting read because I was four years old at the time and have only very vague memories of it but what comes across is how there was a widespread element of deprivation and economic difficulty - the famous period of three million unemployed (it is quite likely, I think, that Margaret Thatcher would have lost the 1983 election without the victory over Argentina in the Falklands which looms large over the lives of the people Theroux interacted with). I found his account of Ulster fascinating, if marred by complete lack of historical background replaced by a bizarre theory about family roles, and the description of desolate grandeur of Sutherland made me want to go there immediately.

On the other hand, Theroux paints a very powerful portrait of poverty and unemployment in the UK during the Falkland Islands era.One of his golden talents, perhaps because he is American and therefore classless in British eyes, is the ability to chat up and get on with all sorts and conditions of British. When the shadow reached him the sun would be gone, the world would turn grey, a cold breeze would blow. Set in classic Westall country-the north of England, shortly after WWII-this atmospheric novel tackles fairly sophisticated subject matter: a 17-year-old's affair with a woman nearly twice his age. Summary: Beautifully written, gloomy, depressive and funny at the same time, this exploration of coastal UK at the time of the Falkland War as a metaphor for a crumbling empire is now a travel classic.