217:. The Prime Minister talks about sovereign territory being invaded by a foreign power, but to Raban '...her cross, nanny's voice made it sound as if there had been ructions in the nursery and the children were going to be sent to bed without any tea.' He considers equally absurd the majority of MPs who are baying for Argentinian blood. Raban turns his radio off in disgust, '...sick of the sound of groaning men baying like a wolf pack. It wasn't a debate, it was a verbal bloodletting, with words standing for the guns and bayonets that would come later when the fleet reached the islands.' and adds, 'Listening to it, I felt that I'd been eavesdropping on the nastier workings of the national subconscious; I'd overheard Britain talking in a dream, and what it was saying scared me stiff.'
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treasuring pennies for treasuring's sake...When it comes to sex, they are furtive and hypocritical - and their erotic tastes are known to be extremely peculiar. Many
Englishmen will pay a woman to take their trousers down and spank them...For the most part, though, the English, both men and women, are afflicted by such a morbid decay of their libido that it has always puzzled the rest of the world how the English manage to reproduce themselves at all.
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society since a vicar's stipend was about £700 a year, equal to that of a skilled labourer living on a council estate. Raban sums his family's situation up in his own clinically detached manner: 'We belonged nowhere, We had the money of one lot, the voices of another - and we had an unearthly goodliness which removed us from the social map altogether.'
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Probably one of the best descriptions in the book is of the author's life as a child growing up in assorted Church of
England vicarages, in a kind of social no-man's land, unable to mix with the council estate children opposite because they are socially inferior but also out of place in upper class
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The book is remarkable for its penetrating and highly perceptive insights into the character and state of the
British nation at the time of writing. One also has to greatly admire him for taking on the challenge of a single-handed voyage around the British Isles, a feat that requires great personal
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They love fine social distinctions and divisions and are snobbishly wedded to an antique system of caste and class ... They are aggressively practical and philistine, with a loud contempt for anything that smells abstract or theoretical. They are a nation of moneygrubbers and bargain-hunters,
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I grew up with a sentimentalised version of the
English past, of the enshrined holiness of the squire in the grand house and the tenant farmer and the exact place you occupied. I got ticked off by my father in my early teens if I was seen wandering down the street with a girl from the local
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And it is his negative feelings towards an increasingly alien
Britain under the dominance of Thatcher that finally persuade him to make the decision to leave his homeland, although the paradox is that they share a like-minded attitude towards its rigid social hierarchy:
234:. You know: "Not your class, old boy" ... I have to say, however, that it was easy to leave England in 1990. I hated England under Thatcher, although in a funny way I shouldn't have. I mean, she was as antagonistic to the old system of England as I was.
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becomes a metaphor for the insularity of the larger island on which he himself had been brought up and lived up till this point. Raban himself has commented on his own attitude to
England and the influence of
164:; he sailed by the look of the coastline. His story takes various digressions, just as his journey does, as he mulls over his childhood as the son of a
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on
Britain at the time of writing his book. The British he sees as being famous for their insular arrogance and condescension. As he describes them:
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The author is equally bitter about the dominant, hectoring Mrs
Thatcher. Whilst comfortably moored up in the
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on a beautiful stretch of the River Yealm, he tunes into the House of
Commons debate on the
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which he made in 1982 (at the age of 40) in an old restored 32-foot sea-going
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courage on the part of the sailor. For most of the book, Raban, rather like
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describes
Jonathan Raban's single-handed 4,000 mile voyage around
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Chapter Two is a description of the dogged insularity of the
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132:. It has received a positive review by
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359:James Campbell (20 September 2003).
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414:Books about the United Kingdom
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230:whom I had met at a church
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404:English non-fiction books
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144:Written as a travelogue,
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176:during the time of the
394:1986 non-fiction books
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16:Book by Jonathan Raban
409:American travel books
399:British travel books
307:"BOOKS OF THE TIMES"
361:"Northern Exposure"
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334:"Green Metropolis"
312:The New York Times
215:Falklands invasion
189:Falkland Islanders
198:Margaret Thatcher
174:Margaret Thatcher
170:Church of England
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370:. Retrieved
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344:12 November
193:Isle of Man
126:travel book
388:Categories
292:References
283:Criticism
249:Middleton
46:Publisher
22:Coasting
279:driver.
253:McMullen
146:Coasting
121:Coasting
88:14001637
277:minicab
168:in the
150:Britain
372:22 May
318:22 May
255:, and
156:, the
36:Author
241:Joyce
166:vicar
154:ketch
124:is a
374:2007
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320:2007
273:Hull
185:Manx
82:OCLC
69:ISBN
62:1986
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128:by
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Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Additional terms may apply.
