Customer Reviews

Yes We Have No: Adventures in the Other England

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

 

 

And what would you know about anything, living in Connecticut. Boring Spain and Portugal... boring portraits of boring people, I went to Connecticut once, but that's another story and I don't want to shock you with tales of wild excitement...not! Nick Cohn is a great observer and storyteller; he finds uniqueness and originality in the mundane. Like Orwell and Dickens he has captured the zeitgeist in his expressive prose, traveling the length and breadth of the UK describing what he sees and whom he meets. When you live somewhere you tend to see it in a certain way, through a gossamer haze, you don't see the sharp edges any more, your brain forces you to filter certain things out, but when you move away from the place of your youth and then return, as Mr. Cohn did, everything that was once normal and comforting is now strange and different. Because of this Mr. Cohn gives us a refreshing view of life in the UK as it is for a great number of people as we head towards the next millennium, the fallout of Thatcher, of 15% unemployment and of the whole E generation. I'm sorry if you thought it was a worm's eye view of the British Isles, but wasn't Hard Times or the Road to Wigan Pier? Americans expect the UK to be all Pall Mall, Buckingham Palace and a weekend in the Shires. A modern day classic, if you are at all interested in modern day British sociology, give this book a try. I couldn't put it down.

Gotta say that my high hopes for this book sank further and further with every chapter I read. Rather than present the "Adventures in the Other England" that the subtitle promises, Cohn instead gives the reader transcriptions of conversation after conversation. Yes, he does have a knack for finding interesting people to talk to, but once he's done that, he seems content to record what they say and leave it at that. One thing he does try to stress is what a melting pot England has become since WWII and what a diverse array of lifestyles it now hosts. But unless you're completely unaware and still think Britain is nothing more than a country of cozy tea rooms and ye olde tradition, none of this is news. A far more enlightening (and depressing) book on the state of modern Britain is Nick Danziger's travelogue "Danziger's Britain."

I'm not sure how successful Cohn is at describing the 'real' England. The motley cast of characters he 'happens' upon are just as unrepresentative of England as Dick Van Dyke's chimney sweep. But I guess a series of interviews with the real population of England - like anywhere else in the west: a collection of fairly nice but dull suburbanites - would not have made for a gripping read. And this is a gripping read - one of those books I couldn't put down.

But I am suspicious of the provenance of much of the text. I get the feeling that much of what people say in the book seem to be things Cohn would have liked them to say rather than the actual verbatium 'truth'. Fair enough I supose.

(By way of example, I come from Derry and I know for a fact no one but an imaginative journalist like Cohn could describe it in romantic terms!!)

I enjoyed this book, the whimsical characters Cohn meets are a fascinating subsection of the British underground types.

In a dynamic Europe, the British Isles have as much significance as boring Spain and Portugal. Nik -o gives us a bookful of boring portraits of boring people. You can get this sort of stuff for nothing in the Rupert Murdoch press. Forget this one.

Not only have I read this book - I'm in it! In fact, the whole book's about me (read between the lines). I'm on the last four pages of the next to last chapter. It's obvious (to me) that the rest of the book exists merely as a contrast and backdrop to... er... well... ME! Some parts of it are wrong. I don't have a pentagram on my wall, I don't look like Yogi Bear... etc. But I suppose Nik Cohn couldn't be seen to be in any way supporting me. It would hardly boost his reputation! If he'd better suggested what the book was really about - I'd have given it five stars.