The Kingdom By The Sea by Paul Theroux

The Kingdom by the Sea by Paul Theroux

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I finished this and I thought: isn’t it weird that the more things change, the more things stay the same. There are parts of The Kingdom By The Sea that feel like something from another world: people who were born before 1900; an overnight room with Bed and Breakfast for £10; people still wrestling with the impact of the Second World War; but then there’s other things that feel weirdly familiar: train strikes; a nation at war with a distant enemy; a preoccupation with royal news. What is Britain and is it this? It’s a question that Paul Theroux tries to answer repeatedly in his journey around the coast of the country and it’s one that, I think, he has some delight in never quite answering.

There’s a delicious irascibility throughout this book and it’s one that is very readable, even at its irascibilitest (this is not a word but I think it should be and so, it is in). Theroux writes of places that are respectful, wild, dangerous, dull, dancing on the edge of the wilderness, and he isn’t ever quite afraid to let you know how he feels about them. He dislikes a lot of them, let’s be frank, but then all of a sudden, he finds himself loving something incredibly small or weird, even when he doesn’t really want to. Amateur dramatics. The British tendency towards hopefulness. Cars full of people who drive to the seaside to sit and watch the sea. Britishness, I guess, in all its eccentric, self-conscious, strange, mad glory.

I liked Theroux. I liked how he travelled. He walked an enormous lot and got the trains with an enormous amount of casual ease (lol, not today bud) and I never quite understood the description of the shoes he wore but I liked that. I liked the idea of this slightly strange and unknowable figure just kind of meandering through the landscape. I actually found something almost folkloric about his movement through the landscape, the way that he was a witness to these very specific moments in time and space before then moving on, never quite stopping, always looking and listening and learning from the world about him. In a way, I feel like there might always be somebody doing something similar right now, moving along the coast from story to story, looking inwards as much as they do outwards, realising that what this country is, this moment is, is never quite fixed, solid, never quite known, and understanding that that, perhaps, is its greatest strength.

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