Publisher's Weekly Review
Bennett, who's written several funny books about his adopted home, New Zealand, decided to roam his native England in the footsteps of H.V. Morton, a good-old-boy who traveled England in 1926 for his popular In Search of England. Bennett, remembering the footloose wanderings of his youth, had planned to hitchhike, but after hours and days just standing by high-speed motorways, he took a few trains before borrowing his buddy's car. He visited the durable tourist destinations--Bath, Salisbury, etc.--as well as many spots notable in Morton's day but barely interesting to modern visitors. Still, some detail always catches Bennett's eye, from the way modern football uniforms resemble "a sort of sexy lingerie," to the "lachrymose drunk" wandering the pub, "hugging anyone she can, like a blowsy octopus." Bennett feels there are "few truly remarkable places"--and most "are more significant when imagined than when visited." In the end, he stumbles on the filming of Antiques Roadshow at Norwich Cathedral--a perfect example of the commercialization of history. Readers will enjoy Bennett's understated, ironic humor, whether or not they plan to visit England. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
An expatriate rediscovers the country he left behind and lets the chips, including the one on his shoulder, fall where they may. The author, a former teacher who left England somewhat accidentally for New Zealand, returns quite calculatingly after 18 years to write a book about what he will discover. His mission is to recreate a 1926 motor tour taken by once-popular British writer H. V. Morton, who drove "a Bertie Wooster car [and had] Bertie-Woosterish encounters that he reported in Bertie-Woosterish style." Morton's aim was "to find the real England," and Bennett follows in his tire tracks from London west to Cornwall, Wales, the Midlands, the industrial North and back again. This circuit encompasses some of the country's most visited locales, including those depressingly "tarted up" (in the author's view) for the tourist trade. Bennett provides a candid impression of these byways and the people who now live there, waiting to welcome--or not--the casual visitor and share--or not--their revered--or not--heritage. The landscape has changed since the days of Morton. The growth of street crime is reflected in police warning signs posted in even the most secluded villages. The culture of the motorway itself, with BMWs and Volkswagens streaming off the major routes into local car parks, has been permanently altered. Bennett travels across empty windswept moors and private green glades. He visits pubs and has random encounters in the streets. In the face of waning traditions and modern tensions, he still manages to capture the essence of England. Acerbic but entertaining: a good read for Anglophiles and prospective visitors. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Bennett (A Land of Two Halves: An Accidental Tour of New Zealand), now a full-time New Zealand writer, revisits his native land of the subtitle. The result is the UK publication, with a U.S. distributor: one of its many joys is its disregard for the niceties of language that would have rendered it fully accessible to an American market. You're getting the real deal here, unfiltered, not one of those time-spent-in-a-humble-village-learning-the-joys-of-pressing-olives-while-making-a-fortune-in-paperback-reprint-rights. Bennett is one of us (well, no, he's not a librarian), figuring he'll hitch his way around England, much as he'd done in his youth in the 1970s. He decides to use as his "standard of comparison" (not overstressed) the route from which H.V. Morton wrote his once-famous In Search of England (1927). Bennett's hitching is a no-go, and the trains keep him from life in the by-ways. So he borrows a car - a fancy Audi - and travels more or less from pub to pub, around England's perimeter, richly describing everything from the shouts of players in a football game ("as meaningless and repetitive as a Latin mass") to a signpost pointing to a town named Pityme. Bennett is a master of rhythmic, enlightening description and self-honesty. This unvarnished yet somehow delicate take on 21st-century England is a charmer; any travel collection that seeks depth and authenticity should get it.-Margaret Heilbrun, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.