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An Utterly Impartial History of Britain
Learning things is fun. Well, that’s what I tell my daughter now that she’s started school anyway. But it is true, increasing the sum of your knowledge is enriching and empowering and for this reason I like to mix up some educational non fiction on my daily commute amongst the normal run of pot boilers and pulp fiction.
Now, as much as I like to learn things I don’t really want to have to think too hard if I can help it so most of these books need to be pitched at the right level. That might mean that they are aimed at a populist audience but as often as not it means they are written with an eye to the humour as much as the subject matter.
So it was that this book caught my eye in Borders when I was spending some book tokens given to me by former colleagues last Christmas. I’m not that familiar with the writer; John O’Farrell, I believe he writes for the Guardian and has been a comedy writer for some years but I haven’t knowingly read or seen his work in the past. I had seen him on various ‘Have I Got News for You’ type panel shows and ‘Grumpy Old Men’ and he was usually entertaining enough without really standing out.
The jacket art work grabbed my attention initially and the blurb made me chuckle. History, especially the history of your own country, is one of those things that you feel you have a pretty good handle on but you also know that you are probably just one follow up question away from ignorance. We may not have the antiquity of your Romans, Greeks and Egyptians but we do have two millennia
packed full off interesting stuff that you’d think would be pretty well known to us (at least those of us brought up through the English schools system anyway) but a quick straw poll around the office came up with the following, rather sketchy, historical outline:
Ancient Britons, Romans, Boudicca, More Romans, Saxons, King Arthur, Vikings, Ethelred the Unready, Normans, Crusades, St George, Richard the Lionheart, Robin Hood, Agincourt, Henry VIII, Spanish Armada, Cromwell, Mad King George, Wellington & Nelson, Empire, Victoria, two World Wars and one World Cup.
OK, most of the people in my office are outsourced IT workers from India but that is still a fair summary of most people’s knowledge, give or take the odd mythical character. Sure, with a bit of time we could add a few royal houses, battles and Chartist Uprisings but you get the idea. Clearly there was a need for this book in my schedule.
Content ~ The book covers two thousand years of British history from Roman occupation and Boudicca’s uprising around 50BC to the end of World War Two in 1945, approximately the point at which we stopped being interesting on a global scale. The book is sub-titled ‘2000 Years of Upper Class Idiots in Charge’ which, while not as informative as the actual title is at least rather more representative of the contents. This is an English history in all honesty, the Celtic nations are only referenced by association, and a history that focuses almost exclusively on the kings, queens and ruling classes rather than the nation as a whole.
Weighing in at a hefty five hundred plus pages this is a big book, but then there is a lot of ground to cover. Divided into several sections, loosely governed by density of action and interest rather than duration, we start with the Ancient Britons and the Roman invasions, before moving through the Dark Ages and into the Normans. The Tudors and Stuarts are dealt with in detail before the ages of Revolution and Empire bring us to the final section covering the two World Wars.
There are no gaps in the history, all the ages in the timeframe are covered but where there is a scarcity of knowledge this isn’t hidden and a wider discussion of the period is covered. As we reach more popular ages the author is able to provide more detail but manages not to lose the momentum of the book. Inevitably, the book is rather superficial in its treatment and in many places provides little more than a headline tour of the ages. There is precious little detail about the broader social history of the country, particularly in the first one and a half millennia, and while this is a shame it is understandable.
What it does provide is a very useful pointer, I hesitate to use the word ‘reference’, to the end to end history of the country. Who followed who, who ruled who and why so few of our kings actually spoke English is all covered at pace and this is where the interest in the book comes from. It doesn’t tell us everything we didn’t know but it does fill in gaps in our knowledge and expands on those bits we do know.
Style ~ As I mentioned at the beginning O’Farrell is a satirical writer, columnist and panellist. He has several books to his name as well as the newspaper work but I get the impression he started out as a sketch and gag writer for TV shows. This provenance comes across clearly in his writing and certainly in the first half of the book you sense that he is intent on finishing each paragraph with a joke. Usually these are pretty funny and it is the kind of writing I enjoy but page after page of it makes it wear a little thin. A bit of variety in the humour wouldn’t go amiss, he never builds up to a gag or tells a funny story as such, rather he’ll relate an episode and then tack on the gag at the end. It is funny, just not very sophisticated and what works well in a thousand word newspaper column does not necessarily scale up to a full size book.
There also appears to be some statute of limitations on the humour, in the early pages every episode is rounded off with a joke no matter what the circumstances. Now, while Edward II being killed by having a red hot poker stuck up his bum is funny whichever way you cut it, it was probably quite traumatic at the time. Likewise the Vikings repeatedly tearing through the country destroying everything and everyone in their path is unimaginably horrific but after a thousand years has become fertile ground for jokes. Once we reach the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the humour is more rationed and the targets more carefully selected.
O’Farrell isn’t much given to editorial digression, he pretty well sticks to the job in hand throughout, but towards the end of the first half of the book he does stray into personal opinion on the nature of Englishness. In a brief diversion he highlights the inherent riskiness in tracing Englishness through the millennia. The number of invasions and incursions in the first thousand years wreaked havoc with the population and claiming descendency from the builders of Stonehenge, Boudicca or the Saxons is optimistic at best. If the Warrior Queen was English then we aren’t and vice versa. Interesting stuff and a good prompt towards further reading.
Opinion ~ I enjoyed this book. I learnt a fair amount I didn’t know before, I reinforced and enhanced much that I already knew of and I was reasonably entertained throughout. ‘Reasonably’ entertained sounds devastatingly damning with faint praise but I don’t mean to be harsh. O’Farrell writes well and is funny it’s just that it is all a little one-paced when a bit of variation would have been welcome.
I will read this again one day and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to anyone else.
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