Customer Reviews

The Angry Island: Hunting the English

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4 star:		(2)
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2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The previous reviewer should have read the book. Mr. Gill's descriptions of British War memorials are almost unfailingly admiring--and constitute some of the best writing in the book. Angry Island is both acerbic, precise and hilariously funny social commentary--and a heartfelt cry for reason. Hyperbolic, cruel--and yet true enough. It's the sympathy and humanism peeking out from inside Gill's silk-lined jacket that makes him such a great essayist, another splendidly failed idealist--like Orwell or Hunter Thompson.

Make no bones about it....A.A. Gill does not consider himself to be British even though he has lived amongst them all of his life. He's a Scot and from the beginning this difference as well as other nations' comparisons are wryly and often harshly drawn out. This is a wonder of a book and probably the first book I've read that isn't propelled by nouns and verbs. "The Angry Island" is all about adjectives, spiced up with a lot of invective. From page one, I couldn't put it down for a minute.

The author covers a wide range of topics about which to consider the Brits...their history, humour, class, voice, sport, drink and so on. At almost every turn, Gill pummels away. There is a rogues gallery of portraits of English kings and queens, described by Gill in various ways of contempt. The narrative gets really juicy as he relates the British "soul" (or lack, thereof) and his ability to write memorable phrases is outstanding. When, for instance, he speaks of the quintessential British fondness for gardening, he asks why we don't ever see people in those gardens. (Gardens do, apparently, make great final resting places for the dead) A typical Gill comment is this one, regarding why Brits are always queueing up. He says, "the English queue because they have to. If they didn't, they'd kill each other". And in a terrific chapter about nostalgia, Gill reminds us that the word itself, didn't exist before 1900. It didn't have to. But then again, the Empire was about to fall apart, hence the current nostalgia. Everything was better in your parent's generation, of course, than it is today.

"The Angry Island" is not just one tirade after another. Gill compliments the British on their memorials, especially those commemorating the "Great War." And in a personal chapter, while reporting that the English love their drink to the point of besottedness, he reveals his own alcoholism. It's a poignant moment in an otherwise stormy book.

The author does have a knack for the use of adjectives and they abound in "The Angry Island", making the read all the more enjoyable. But it's his ability to peel back the layers of this overly-composed nation to get at what is really either wrong or funny (or both!) about the seemingly most uptight people in the world. To this end, I highly recommend "The Angry Island". It may not make one understand the British any better, but then again, it just may.

Mr Gill's polemical little treatise is simply awful. It is one of the most venomous, hate-filled, bile-soaked bundles of papers created ever since Mr A. Hitler put down the paintbrush and took up the genocide-advocacy business.

It is also one of the most delightful, lyrical books I've ever been fortunate enough to read.

I exaggerate, of course, and this is exactly what Mr Gill does as he sets about deliberately trying to demolish every shibboleth, to pull the tail of every sacred cow, to dispel every assumption there ever was about the English.

His central theme is that far from being restrained, witty, animal-loving gentlemen, the single defining characteristic of the English is their anger. He does so in 16 vitriolic chapters smashing preconceptions on everything from humor and drinking, to gardening and sports. It's perhaps with deliberate irony that a book that takes the English to task for their madness should do so in such froth-flecked terms.

Indeed, it would be easy to be distracted by the book's many annoyances. Take, for example, Mr Gill's pedantic insistence on identifying himself as a Scot, despite having lived his life since age 1 in England. Not only does this strike me as ungrateful, but the whole "Scotland is a country" riff comes off as childish, like two siblings drawing an invisible dividing line down a shared bedroom.

Yet getting angry with Mr Gill would not only prove him so smugly right, but it would also deprive you of the joy of his prose. Whatever I think of the man or his views, he knows how to write, how to make words sing. In Mr Gill's prose, stairs are "clumsy" with flowers, class snobbery is as "smart as a wet patch" on the front of your pants, airports are "the maternity units of queues".

However over-the-top his views, there is much here that is intelligently observed. Take, for example, the English war against the Zulus, in which England doled out an unprecedented number of Victoria Crosses. The really brave ones, notes Mr Gill, were the Zulus, who took on the British armed with no more than a knife on a stick and a leather coffee table. His enumeration of all the ways "sorry" can mean something else, if not its complete opposite, is spot-on.

Finally, the book is undoubtedly funny. As he admits in the chapter on Humor, English jokes are often at their funniest when aimed, not shared, and his own book is Exhibit A. This attack on the English class system is as hilarious as it is unprintable. His description of the English delight in their own misfortune--a kind of self-reflexive schadenfreude--will tickle anyone who has spent time among the English.

Disjointed, bombastic, frequently wide of the mark, Yes. But also witty, intelligent and poetic. Ah, the man may talk like the devil, but he writes like an angel.

I enjoyed this book. I did skip around, leaving some chapters til later and reading only what was of interest to me currently. Yes, he is outrageous and does sound insulting - but really it's up to one who disagrees with the author to develop a counter argument.

I could not enjoy the book 100% because I am not English, and have never visted the isle. But I could enjoy the opinions (and that's what they are, opinions) raised in the book.

What I found most entertaining is the author's way with words - he is defintely a word-monger and word-weaver - two very English traits.

I felt I learned some things about English culture and was motivated to learn more. What more can you want from a book? It opened my eyes to new ways of thinking and spurred me to learn more about England and its people

The English have always been the targets of humorous criticism and Mr. Gill's book rightly rakes them over the coals. His extremely witty take makes for enjoyable reading even for Anglofiles. That being said,Gill doesn't know when to stop. The first half is funny , and I assume, true, but he keeps on going telling the same joke over and over again. Enough already!

This book disappoints. As other reviewers have noted, perhaps the author's gifts are best expressed in other formats. The various conceits upon which he constructs his tirades are not strong enough to support their size. Or, as a Brit might say, he does go on a bit. Save your $$--get it from a library and dip in to some funny moments in the 1st half of the book. It's not one you'll want to own.

"Anger is an energy," Johnny Rotten sang. Although uncited here, he speaks for the minority; most repress resentment. According to Gill, the "high-maintenance, self-imposed" English contradict themselves. They hold bile rather than spit. In this, they characterize themselves as restrained and dignified. In fact, they act not in harmony with but despite their inner nature.

"Anger has made the English an ugly race. But then this anger is also the source of England's most 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 tearoom, that I admire most in the English." (8) Born in Scotland, but raised in England, Gill relates his life of observing a people like but not like himself in humorous, scabrous, and intelligent chapters that roam into the character of a nation of his sullen, clenched, muttering neighbors.

Faces (the National Portrait Gallery's postcards and pictures as a case study), voices (Received Pronunciation gives orders vs. Estuary makes friends), war memorials (to dead dogs as well as dead soldiers), class, humor, and the Cotswolds (compared to a second-hand porn mag passed from satiated customer to greedy buyer), and the ubiquitous "Sorry" prove Gill's first targets. Animals, Drink, Gardens (like churches, best toiled in rather than rested at, for plenty of time to molder in both when dead), Political Correctness (surprisingly, despite his aspersions to the Welsh, Gill as a humorist by journalistic profession favors its civilizing tendencies), and queues follow. The early New Age experiments at Letchworth Garden City and suitably nostalgia (National Trust) close this "collection of prejudice"-- this phrase opening the book.

I wondered, for lack of material that gained any cross-reference or elaboration, if these appeared as separate essays but no mention of this occurs. This is a persistent fault: these seem as if disparate diatribes, with no core argument to link them. The hectoring tone does wear on after a while, and the information marshalled in service of scorn even for this disaffected Irishman overwhelmed me as a reader less obsessed.

Gill packs erudition into this sociological treatise disguised as a light read. He also writes well. Near his Soho home, he sees a pub with Chelsea v. Newcastle: its "office worker" patrons "waylaid on their way to homes too distant and uninviting to arrive at sober. Everyone was looking up, eyes transfixed at a different corner of the room like so many cats watching moths." (96) Later, he waxes about the rooms above pubs where obsessives meet. He captures the awfulness of a comedy open mike night in one pub, and this often droll, even poignant as well as cruel chapter, "Humor," is the best in the book. "Go into any pub and listen to the groups of boys chuckling in circles. It's not a sound you hear anywhere else." (105)

Outside London, the rest of England molders, for sale to exurbans. In a Cotswolds antique shop, Gill reflects: "The lives that have been trickled and sobbed away in the company of this stuff. The old dolls' houses that reek of musty, miserable, lonely childhoods; the pictures of anonymous fields and buoyant seas that stared out over loveless blameful bedrooms; all the utensils of a Victorian wife worn to blunt, smooth distraction by below-stairs indenture." (114)

This reverberates for me in his adolescent drinking memories, for at fifteen: "Everything is plagiarized, borrowed, or made up out of nothing. Your life's like a Third World gift shop, you keep trying to guess what the rich grown-ups want in the hope that one day you'll become one of them." (136) When you do come of age, you still cannot avoid other English, no matter how far you travel. At an foreign airport, Gill accidently steps in front of a "two-person queue," a middle-aged grumpy couple. He apologizes. "Now, if there's one thing an Englishman can't abide it's an apology before he's finished. Combined with a smile, it's akin to sodomy without an introduction." (172) You need no better introduction to the tone of this "collection of prejudice" by one who knows his captors all too well, and could almost pass for one of them after a year in Scotland and over fifty in England.

Mr. Gill is a Scot, not an Englishman, and he insists on maintaining that distinction even though he has spent most of his life among the English. His observations depend on a sharp eye and a sound historical perspective. His portrayal of the English is full of surprises and his revelations are exhilarating and profoundly funny.

AA Gill is one of the foremost essayists in the English language today and this book proves it - because this is not a collection of essays.

Reading The Angry English, you think of a painter trying sculpture or a boxer moving up two weights in one go. The basic skills are there, the man has a well-earned reputation but.............

The Angry English is a rant and little else. If Gill had condensed this rant into essay length it might have been the funniest and most infuriating piece he'd ever written. Unfortunately, he was persuaded (I cannot believe it was his idea) to go book-length and he simply doesn't have the stamina, variety or content to make it work.

Oh, there are some very quotable Gill-isms in here but you'll have to shovel a lot of dross to get to them. Overall, the author makes much of his Scottish birth as a reason to loathe the English (as if anyone needed to dig so deep for a reason) but it simply doesn't have the legs to carry Gill's rant to the finishing post of a full-length book.

If you're interested in a book about the English, try Paxman's effort - not as acid as Gill but every bit as enlightening and amusing.

A book of disjointed observations on the modern condition of our country's parent isle. It would have been better left as a series of magazine essays---with some of its chapters omitted from the series.

A.A. Gill writes in a style used by many of today's edgy (read: quick, terse, ironic, condescending, black-edged humorous) columnists: it is designed to immediately grab one's attention and provoke a quick laugh. But sustained over the length of a book, this style--based on the author's acrobatic use of language-- wears on a reader.

If you have only time this year for one funny, well-written, and off-beat book tied to England, buy and read Alexander Waugh's Fathers and Sons.