Word: theroux
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...KINGDOM BY THE SEA by Paul Theroux...
...because they make good backdrops for sketches of himself in jaunty poses; the reader tolerates this hamminess because tales of bandits and dysentery make him feel snug in his armchair. Writing such stuff is an honest dodge, and in recent years no one has dodged more expertly than Paul Theroux in The Great Railway Bazaar (Europe and Asia) and The Old Patagonian Express (North and South America...
...Theroux violates the unspoken rule in his third travel book, subtitled A Journey Around Great Britain. Here he loathes almost everything he sees and despises each new horror more than the one before. Since there is no reason to believe that he is wholly wrong in his judgments, he convinces the reader that to visit this wretched shore would be an act of lunacy...
...Theroux had lived for eleven years in London, he writes ("I had come to dislike the city"), but knew little about the rest of England. He decided to travel around its coast and those of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, going mainly by foot and rail, as is his custom, and avoiding cathedrals and castles on principle. The prem ise sounds delightful; the practice was catastrophic. Man was so vile that few prospects pleased. The author found defeated respectability at best, tackiness and decay as a matter of course, buildings meanly and cheaply made, people ignorant and dulled...
...Theroux cheers up briefly in Wales, possibly because the Welsh language, which he does not understand, makes what is dreary seem exotic. (No doubt travel writers should stick to countries whose languages elude them: bad German, for instance, is an asset in Zurich; you can have a comical adventure asking for a train ticket to Senf, which means mustard, instead of Genf, which is Geneva.) Following the coast turned out to be a mistake, because its towns were filled with a seedier lot of tourists than Theroux would have met in castles and cathedrals...