Thoughts on Bill Bryson

This is apropos of nothing in particular, except that I just finished what I believe may be the last book by humorist-cum-travel writer Bill Bryson that I'd never read, except for one. And since the man has been entertaining me off and on for a goodly portion of my reading life, I feel like some sort of summing up is in order, if only for my own satisfaction.

Beginning with his account of a rambling trip around the Australian outback ("In a Sunburnt Country"), I've followed Bryson across three continents, plus an entire journey dedicated to Great Britain, and another that traversed much of the Appalachian Trail.

But he's considerably more than just a travel writer; perhaps his best work is "A Brief History of Nearly Everything," an ambitious and, overall, hugely successful attempt by a scientific layman to recount the history of almost all major scientific knowledge for a layperson audience, interspersed with biographical sketches of all the great, often bizarre, thinkers who made the most momentous contributions to science. (My personal favorite is his account of Sir Isaac Newton, who probed the bones in his skull behind his eyeball with a sharp knife with clinical detachment, but suffered no pain.)

I read Bryson's works largely out of order, but there's no particular reason not to do that. His account of a whirlwind tour across Europe from northernmost Scandanavia to Istanbul ("Neither Here nor There") was written a decade before the much more popular "A Walk in the Woods," but no matter. If anything, I've enjoyed picking up the various threads of an interesting man's life at different, haphazard intervals, skipping forwards and backwards in time. At any age and on any subject, Bryson is an engaging writer, and since he'd completed most of his work before I became aware of him, I've had the luxury of picking and choosing from a wide repertoire.

But whatever his subject matter, I ultimately read Bill Bryson because the man is a hoot. He has the wonderful ability both to find his way into absurd situations, particularly when traveling, and to appreciate the humor in those situations, even when at his own expense. For instance, in one memorable passage of his European tale, he blunders into an exorbitantly priced hotel in Gothenberg, but because he's too embarrassed to simply walk out upon hearing the outrageous rates, tries to seize on some supposed deficiency of the hotel as an excuse to find it unacceptable. Grilling the desk clerk, he inquires, "'I assume it has a private bath and color TV?'
'Of course.'
'Free shower cap?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Assortment of complimentary bath gels and unguents in a little wicker basket by the sink?'
'Certainly, sir.'
'Sewing kit? Trouser press?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Hair dryer?'
'Yes, sir.'
I played my trump card. 'Magic-wipe disposable shoe sponge?'
'Yes, sir.'
Shit."

Stymied, he took the room.

But this wouldn't be Jim Unfiltered if I didn't have bones to pick, and even a writer I enjoy as much as Bill Bryson has a flaw or two.

Actually, Bryson' s flaws really are few and far between, and I write this humble criticism largely as a genuflection to a writer I admire a great deal. But I will say this: After reading a small stack of his travel books, I cannot help but grow weary of a fair constantly stream of griping about the expensiveness of the hotels he stays in and the restaurants where he dines. Granted, in a pure travel guide, notes about logistical costs of a given destination figure prominently; vacations are always an exercise in cost/benefit analysis, and so readers need a Fodors or similar guidebook to plan ahead.

But Bryson isn't Fodors. He doesn't write to advise readers where to stay or what restaurant to avoid. He writes to describe the places he visits, so that a job-bound reader with no prospect of going on his own grand tour of Europe can at least get a flavor of the experience and understand why it's worthwhile. So to have a very amusing writer forever interrupting his own amusing narrative with complaints about the high costs of traveling wears a bit thin after a while. To be able to travel widely and then get complete strangers to pay to read your descriptions afterwards is something of a luxury, one that Bryson doesn't seem to fully appreciate. At some point reading "Neither Here nor There" on a commuter train on the way to my office cubicle, I remember thinking, "Yes, too bad you had to buy all those expensive beers in Copenhagen before flying off to Italy. I feel for you."

Occasionally, this lack of awareness translates into a certain political myopia. Bryson forever laments the demise of old, medieval architecture in Europe and its replacement by ugly modernity. While I sympathize on aesthetic grounds, I can't help but notice a certain latent, "There ought to be a law against things I don't like" sort of authoritarianism lurking between the lines. For a man clearly well-versed in history, he doesn't seem to have gathered that human beings have been building things and tearing them down to build new things for about as long as we've been walking on our hind legs.

And it was with a certain amount of shock that I read this commentary on the fall of Communism in Europe, at the end of his chapter on Bulgaria, which he visited in 1990:

"[I]t seemed strange to me that in all the words written about the fall of Iron Curtain, nobody anywhere lamented that it was the end of a noble experiment. I know that communism never worked, and I would have disliked living under it myself, but nonetheless it seemed there was a kind of sadness in the thought that the only economic system that appeared to work was one based on self-interest and greed."

An intelligent, learned man ought to know better than to call the Soviet empire, which killed or impoverished countless millions, a "noble experiment."

But I'll forgive him these foibles, because for the most part, Bill Bryson is a lively, hugely informative writer with a great eye for detail and at least one good laugh per page. It is with real sadness that I realize how the bulk of his writing is no longer new to me, though rereading most of it will probably prove a solid consolation.