The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain [Paperback]

Paul Theroux (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2006

After eleven years as an American living in London, the renowned travel writer Paul Theroux set out to travel clockwise around the coast of Great Britain to find out what the British were really like. The result is this perceptive, hilarious record of the journey. Whether in Cornwall or Wales, Ulster or Scotland, the people he encountered along the way revealed far more of themselves than they perhaps intended to display to a stranger. Theroux captured their rich and varied conversational commentary with caustic wit and penetrating insight.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

PAUL THEROUX is the author of many highly acclaimed books. His novels include A Dead Hand and The Mosquito Coast, and his renowned travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star and Dark Star Safari. He lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod.

Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (June 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618658955
• ISBN-13: 978-0618658954
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #597,166 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Paul Theroux's highly acclaimed novels include Blinding Light, Hotel Honolulu, My Other Life, Kowloon Tong, and The Mosquito Coast. His renowned travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Dark Star Safari, Riding the Iron Rooster, The Great Railway Bazaar, The Old Patagonian Express, and The Happy Isles of Oceania. He lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An affectionate look at a changing landscape, September 25, 2003

By 

Michael J Edelman (Huntington Woods, MI USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Kingdom by the Sea (Penguin Audiobooks) (Audio Cassette)

Paul Theroux's travel book soften being out strong opinions in readers- particulrly those who have visited a place he has written about. Many of the most critical seem to focus on a few details and miss the overall tenor of the piece.

As Theroux makes quite clear in this book, he loves the English seacoast, and he met many warm people along the way. At the same time, he unflinchingly relates every detail of his experience, every rude comment, every unpleasant encounter. As he notes, most travel writing is boring; we went to Egypt, we saw the pyramids, et cetera. What makes for interesting reading is the minutia, the detail that makes my trip different from your trip. My England is nothing like Theroux's, but then, I wasn't there for 17 years, I didn't tour the coast, and I am not Paul Theroux.

I recently re-read "Kingdom", while thinking about a bicycle tracing some of the ground covered by Theroux, and what struck me was how much there was that Theroux truely liked about his trip, the things he saw, and the people he met. The more unpleasant encounters only served to make the pleasant ones more so.

"Kingdom By The Sea" is for me, at least, a thouroughly enjoyable tour, a look into the British and into Theroux, and as always, a terrific piece of writing by one of the modern masters.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Kingdom Is Much More Than The Seacoast, May 11, 2009

By 

Notnadia (Currently upstairs.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain (Paperback)

This book was not as much fun as I expected it to be, namely because Mr. Theroux (whom I seriously began to dislike here) seemed to take any excuse to disdain the British as a people, a culture, and a nation. He chose to visit the most run-down of locales and then ballishly complained about them, and in so doing presented the image that his experiences were representative of an entire nation as a whole. Imagine someone touring the coastlines of America, especially the rust belt, and then presenting this as a valid exercise in seeing all there was to see of the place. This is just about what happened in The Kingdom By The Sea.

Paul Theroux said straight off "no castles" making this his mantra and meaning he was concerned with discovering Britain of the moment rather than of the past, which is a fine and worthy undertaking, but as I slogged through chapter after chapter of his complaints about damp and dank boardinghouses, slovenly humanity and bad food, I kept wishing he jolly would include the occasional castle, battlefield, cathedral or treasure house. Theroux made his trek by foot, bus, train and sometimes private car (he was brazen enough to hitchhike on occasion) in 1982, the year that gave Britons the Falklands War, a homicidal madman in Yorkshire, a threatened transit strike, and the joyous birth of a presumably future king, Charles and Diana's son, William. It was a year mired in an era that represented both a relative low point in modern British history and a also a stepping stone to present-day recovery. Yes, Thatcher's Britain was a tottering welfare state that had seen better days, but did Paul Theroux, who cuts the Third World every conceivable bit of slack when he visits it, really, truly HAVE to always see England's glass as half empty?

I actually found myself growing depressed as a read his dreary memoir of what could have been a fascinating journey, and that's just not the sort of experience I was looking for. What could have been a travel journal that uplifted and enthralled instead became a melancholy series of bellicose dreariness.

Four stars for a number of introductions to interesting people Theroux met along the way, especially those old-timers born in the nineteenth-century, but without them popping up here an there as they did, this was barely a three-star read.

14 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Fine writer gets trapped in bad plan, September 28, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Kingdom by the Sea (Penguin Audiobooks) (Audio Cassette)

Theroux's interesting but illstarred plan was to meet the English by travelling around the coast, on foot and by train. Real English, real conversations. He was twenty years too late. About a month into this disaster it's becoming obvious that even the lower middle class have abandoned the gray, chilly English coastal towns for cheap jumbo jets to sunny climes. The old resorts have become God's Waiting Room and battlegrounds for the skinhead urban poor. Chapters go by without him seeing a child, or a real family, only potty old people who hate foreigners. These aren't "the English." Poor Theroux. Read his fine book on China instead.