Funny peculiar
Published 20 November 2008
A Field Guide to the British
Sarah Lyall
Quercus, 277pp, £14.99
Funny peculiar
It is uncertain that the world was crying out for yet another book on the quirks of contemporary Britain and the British, but the phenomenal success of Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island created something of a vogue for the subject among non-British authors - although arguably the best of this mini-genre was produced by a native, Jeremy Paxman. In The English, Paxman took aim at Bryson for lazily trafficking in stereotypes. It is rather more difficult, he asserted, to look at a culture and attempt to describe what is going on and why. Bryson's book was amusing but clichéd, Paxman's well-observed but unfunny. Sarah Lyall's Field Guide to the British succeeds when she manages both well-observed and amusing.
Lyall is an American who moved to London "for love" and began covering Blair's Britain for the New York Times. With her background, her education and her experience as a journalist on America's paper of record, she was well placed to serve as a kind of reverse Alistair Cooke, explaining Britain to Americans as Cooke had America to the Brits. She is less focused on the big events than Cooke and more concerned with analysis of those aspects of modern British life particular to this island which seem peculiar to the foreign (read: American) observer.
She is badly served by her title. This is not a field guide to the British, but a field guide to the English and, by and large, what advertisers would term the AB classes at that. When a Scot appears it is almost invariably in the form of a drunken, kilted figure in the House of Lords, though the "virtually mute" residents of North Uist, trapped under sodden skies and divided over the correct approach to hedgehogs, do get a look-in. The Welsh and Northern Irish are entirely absent as are, generally, the working class.
Lyall does not in any sense avoid clichés, but rather embraces them while elucidating their truths and origins. She tackles head-on old-school Tory duffer-style misogyny, false modesty, U and non-U eccentrics and the tolerance of them, the love of animals and contrasting scant regard for children, the press's difficult relationship with facts, British teeth, the acceptance of privation and shoddiness, the weather. Clichés they may be, but all clichés are true - a San Francisco dentist once remarked when examining the mouth of a British patient that it was "like looking back in time".
Her Field Guide opens with lunch with an earl en famille. She clocks the scruffy cars and freezing house and is struck by the lack of affectation of the aristocracy. "What did I learn about my adopted country? That assumptions were made to be unmade. That true aristocrats are perhaps the only people in Britain secure enough not to care how others view what they drive, wear or eat. That some aspects of British life would likely remain forever beyond the grasp of my feeble colonial understanding. And that when invited to a picnic in the country, you should bring an extra sweater, and possibly also some extra food." Well, quite. But it is strange that Lyall finds this so foreign, having attended a boarding school in New England where, due to the weather, the affection of New Englanders for discomfort and the staple diet of Triscuits and Cheez Whiz, the same advice surely applies.
She fares better with the odd but enduring appeal of Englishmen for foreign women and the almost unfathomable English attitude to sex and bodies. Neatly expressed in the use of language that sounds either harsh - buttocks - or in nursery-speak - rumpy-pumpy, bonking - and the ability of a measurable percentage of the population to find Margaret Thatcher sexually desirable, the English sexual aesthetic is certainly unique:
In my unmarried twenties, I visited London for a long weekend and met a charming handsome Englishman at a smart party. Taken in by his smooth manners and verbal dexterity, I went back to his house for a nightcap. Out went Mr Darcy; in came Austin Powers. The man kissed like someone kissing for the first time, stabbing at my throat with his tongue, and then reverberating it back and forth as if he were a Boy Scout trying to start a fire. He grabbed at elements of my person like a climber who, locating a secure handhold on the rock face, clamps down and will not let go [. . .] I hastily hailed the nearest taxi.
Lyall provides a new slant on a well-worn theme - the English and their peculiarities, little and large. Her Field Guide takes the reader along on her sometimes uncomfortable journey to embrace life in England and when the embracing proves unappetising she anatomises the source of her bemusement with wit, sweetness and considerable style.
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