Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

I love England and I love Paul Theroux so I have only wonderful things to say about this book. I'm there with him as he walks the coast of England.
I'm also a people person, as is he, and the things he writes about touch my soul. I highly recommend this book for anyone who likes fine writing, England, travel, walking tours, people.

This is a terrific book. The author is simply sharing HIS observations of life along the British coastal cities and towns. It's a great read! Even if it's not all peaches and cream, it's what he felt, and you can't help but feel like a traveling companion.

Paul Theroux gives good information and descriptions. He meets people one would not meet on an ordinary trip. The book gives insights into what people do in different cultural and social situations. He describes the various peoples of the British Isles. I can't travel - so this is my travel.

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 conveyable 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.

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.

I ordered this book inorder to be better informed about traveling to the southwest coast of England this year...
It was seemingly a personal journal of someone who was traveling via train along the coast. The reading experience was that the writer was very negative and critical of the people and places visted.....It wasn't very informative about the scenery, people or towns visited......Very disappointing to my desire for information.

I found "The Kingdom by the Sea", read by William Hootkins, snooty and offensive. Its picture of the British is projected right out of the jerkish Theroux's psyche, and does not represent the way one sees a country if one wishes to UNDERSTAND it, which is to see it as it is through the frame of mind of the inhabitants, and with transcendent human sympathy and a great deal of imagination. One goes to another country, first of all, to learn something about ONESELF.

Britain is a country to love, not to hate. Having lived there a year, in 1977-8, it still has my heart, and my embarrassed admiration as an American.

This is the second Theroux audiobook I have found a failure, the first being his book on Latin America.

- Patrick Gunkel (Woods Hole, Massachusetts)