Book 12 - Bill Bryson, A Walk In The Woods

The last book was a memoir of personal recovery and how a hike along the Pacific Crest Trail enabled a young girl reconnect with who she had once been and find the strength to grow into who she wanted to become. This book couldn’t be more different in tone and intent, even if it is about a similarly long through-hike of the East Coast equivalent: the Appalachian Trail. Bill Bryson started his adventure from the place Cheryl Strayed wanted to arrive. He was already a successful author, and settled in his life. As far as we know he had no great demons to face down in the wild, no need for a long physical challenge in order to find his centre. One of the walks was a slightly desperate throw of the dice, the other more of a whim, probably with a book in mind. You might not find much personal redemption in Bryson but there is more humour and information about his surroundings.

I honestly do not know what I can write here that will add anything to what is already known about Bill Bryson and his books. He is an institution. An author used a a reference point in the quotes on the cover of other books; someone who defines his own category. He writes about places or things with humour and although he seems to place himself in the centre of the story, deep down it is not really about him. The narrative might be about his actions and reactions but he doesn’t go deep in his own psyche. He is more interested in what he sees (which is as it should be). I find it confusing when he is described as a humorist; yes he can be funny but he also does his research and is informative. It’s a neat trick: as a reader you learn stuff whilst being amused. It’s what keeps you going and what sets him apart. He has great skill in presenting information, which in other hands could be dry, and make it come alive. Take for example this about trees:

For all its mass, a tree is a remarkably delicate thing. All of its internal life exists within three paper thin layers of tissue, the phloem, xylem, and cambium, just beneath the bark, which together form a moist sleeve around the dead heartwood. However tall it grows, a tree is just a few pounds of living cells thinly spread between roots and leaves. These diligent layers of cells perform all the intricate science and engineering needed to keep a tree alive, and the efficiency with which they do this is one of the wonders of life. Without noise or fuss, every tree in the forest lifts massive volumes of water - several hundred gallons in the case of a large tree on a hot day - from its roots to its leaves. Imagine the din and commotion, the clutter of machinery, that would be needed for a fire department to raise a similar volume of water to that of a single tree. And lifting water is just one of the many jobs that phloem, xylem, and cambium perform

I will never look at trees in the same way again.

But Bryson can also be a bit spiky. His contempt for the National Park Service, which maintains the trail, is a recurring theme.

Here in the Smokies, not far from where Katz and I now trod, the Park Service in 1957 decided to ‘reclaim’ Abrams Creek, a tributary of the Little Tennessee River, for rainbow trout. To that end, biologists dumped extravagant quantities of a poison called rotenone into 15 miles of creek. Within hours, tens of thousands of dead fish were floating on the surface like autumn leaves - what a proud moment that must be for a trained naturalist. Among the 31 species of Abrams Creek fish that were wiped out was one called smoky madam, which scientists had never seen before. Thus the Park Service biologists managed the wonderfully unusual accomplishment of discovering and eradicating a new species of fish in the same instant.

The payoff at the end might be wonderfully ironic but it is the “what a proud moment that must be for a trained naturalist” that is really cutting (especially with the substitution of naturalist for biologist).

I came away from this book with an increased appreciation of the skill with which Bryson puts his books together and the craftsmanship of his writing. It makes an interesting comparison with Wild, in the one I was deeply impressed by the story, in the other by the way the story was told.

Date of first publication
1997

Link to last book

This is pretty obvious. The Appalachian Trail is the east coast equivalent of the Pacific Crest Trail so the two books make an interesting comparison, especially as both the walks must have happened at roughly the same time. Although Wild was published only a couple of years ago and A Walk in the Woods dates from 1997, Strayed started her walk in 1995.

Book 8 - H V Morton, In Search of England

I chose this book because I thought it would tell me about England between the wars and be a link with the descriptions of the Dorest countryside in ‘Rogue Male’.  It might have been written a decade earlier but there would still be similarities. That was the idea and it seemed good at the time. But I picked it up, read a few pages, put it down and thought I would have to write a post on why I couldn’t finish it.

There is nothing wrong with not finishing a book. It is a strange sense of duty that tells you to struggle on, when you are getting nether enjoyment or edification. It does you no good and it certainly doesn’t accumulate you any celestial points. (Tim Parks dealt with this eloquently in ‘Where I’m Reading From’  where he recounts a letter of appreciation from a fellow author who finished by saying that it hadn’t read the last fifty pages because at that point the novel seemed satisfactorily over). But this book was not satisfactorily over, it had not satisfactorily begun. I didn’t want to continue because I had taken against the narrator. I didn’t like the blustering, breezy tone, the patronising way he described others, his attitude to women and the alarm bells that rang in my head when a sentence in the introduction talked of an average city family disappearing into ‘racial anaemia’. A travel book is a trip and if you need to like, or at least trust your companion. So I put it down.

But it seemed a bit week to give up so easily, I thought I ought to try again, just to be sure. and the second time, for whatever reason, I found it more amusing than irritating and was happy to continue. Instead of thinking of the author as some golf club boor, I saw him as a mixture of Mr Pooter and Mr Cholmondley-Warner - in other words a comic creation.

I took out the binoculars and saw a gallows standing up there, a mark for several counties, firm and unmistakable, as if ready for a hanging.
A gibbet!
Before climbing up the steep road I thought that I would ask a few questions. I stopped a labourer on a bicycle.
‘What is that on the hill?’
‘Gallows’ he said suspiciously.
‘Who was hanged there?’
‘Dunno.’
‘When was it last used?’
‘Dunno.’
Have you ever heard any story about it?’
‘No.’

Before I had thought this a piece of nonsense. Now I found it funny. And the breeziness of the prose which before seemed bluff I now saw as narrative drive. Now I am half convinced that some of the humour is intentional:

[another casual conversation, this time on Plymouth Hoe about Drake and the Armada]
‘I would rather have lived in that age than any other,’ said my companion. He was a frill-looking man, as frail looking almost as Nelson.
‘The world must have seemed such a big place then. If one could have gone with Drake in 1577 in the Golden Hind!’
‘Ah! Now the Mauritania is due tomorrow!’
‘Yes’ he sighed.
‘How,’ I said ‘would you like to have burnt up Vera Cruz, to have sacked the churches, and driven the natives below the hatches, and the held a church parade?’
‘Splendid!’ He whispered ‘That was the spirit of the time … Well, I must be going home.’
He said good night and I watched his lank, dyspeptic, blood-thirsty figure fade into the distance.

As I read on I became more aware of other virtues. There are interesting anecdotes from the past and myths associated with some of the ancient buildings. Morton also has a good eye and can write fine descriptive prose:

A curious characteristic of English scenery is its ability to change itself in a distance of a few miles. Towards Devon the rugged Cornish rocks give way to a smoother, more comfortable countryside, a holier, less disturbing vista of green and red fields.
‘In England once again!’ I whispered as I saw a real Devon man ploughing a field, the colour of red ochre where the earth was newly turned and of cocoa where the sun had dried it. A different country.

I like that detail of the colour of the soil.

But the book is not a report of the nation in 1927. Instead it is a romance - a longing for the tales of the past, of King Arthur and Saxons. It is infused with a particular myth of rural Englishness that has all but died out now (except in the collective imagination of UKIP). Perhaps the myths have a particular potency because of the time the book was written,  only a decade after the end of the Great War. After all the destruction, keeping hold of a picture of what was worth fighting for would have been a pressing concern.

So in the end the book was worth reading but I know that whatever the ironical distance I maintained I still found the underlying attitudes of the author uncongenial. It cannot be shrugged off by saying he was a product of his time and our attitudes have moved on and he must be cut some slack. There is still something a bit off, especially when he talks about women. Nevertheless it shouldn’t obscure the fact that there is still quite a lot of fun to be had

Date of first publication
1927

Link to last book

Rogue Male contained good descriptions of the English countryside between the wars. This follows on.