The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson

...work through his book about the UK itself, "Notes from a Small Island". That is certainly a fine book, and well worth a read. But I do wonder whether his earlier work "The Lost Continent" (now 20 years old, amazingly) might not in fact be even better. I was lucky enough to read this first some years ago, before the "Bryson boom", and so had no preconceptions of what the author's work was like. I'm actually quite grateful ...
...he drives vast distances around the country of his birth in his mother's less-than-reliable old car: at one point it breaks down on a lonely, snowy mountain pass and you wonder just for a moment whether Bryson will start to thrash it as did Basil Fawlty all those years ago. At the time this book was written, Bryson had lived in the UK with his British wife for a decade (although he did later return to the US for a few years) . This meant that he ... more

Probably most British readers will first have come across his work through his book about the UK itself, "Notes from a Small Island". That is certainly a fine book, and well worth a read. But I do wonder whether his earlier work "The Lost Continent" (now 20 years old, amazingly) might not in fact be even better. I was lucky enough to read this first some years ago, before the "Bryson boom", and so had no preconceptions of what the author's work was like. I'm actually quite grateful for that, too, since otherwise I might not have had such a nice surprise!

In essence, this book is a travelogue, following in Bryson's wheeltracks as he drives vast distances around the country of his birth in his mother's less-than-reliable old car: at one point it breaks down on a lonely, snowy mountain pass and you wonder just for a moment whether Bryson will start to thrash it as did Basil Fawlty all those years ago. At the time this book was written, Bryson had lived in the UK with his British wife for a decade (although he did later return to the US for a few years) . This meant that he could look at the US with slightly more of an impartial eye than he might otherwise have done, yet still retain enough of his American upbringing to be able to comment with a real affection and knowledge of the nation that might have been beyond a complete outsider.

The words which start this book - "I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to" - should by rights have passed into the quotation books, but for some reason this most perfect of openings tends to pass by the compilers of such things, rather as for many years Bryson's books themselves often passed by the American reading public. It sets up the tale perfectly, and at once we are drawn into Bryson's world, and very soon his mildly sardonic voice, his whinging about the state of motel rooms and his sometimes outright silly humour combined with hard-hitting social invective become our trusty travelling companions and Bryson himself a friend we seem to have known for years.

The book is divided into two parts, "East" and "West", which correspond to Bryson's two trips as well, roughly, as areas on either side of Des Moines. Bryson spends a lot more time on the former than the latter, which I tend to think is rather a shame, since aside from the big coastal cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles (neither mentioned more than incidentally in the book) most British readers are likely to know less about the western United States than about the likes of New York or Massachusetts. We do at least get a fairly lengthy, and very funny, section about Bryson's experiences in Las Vegas: at one point he becomes irritated because he keeps winning on the slot machines, and therefore can't go and look for something to eat...

Bryson undertakes these long trips - nearly 14,000 miles in all - in order to see if he can find, in some forgotten corner, his very own Amalgam. This is the name he gives to the town that would truly embody the mythical small-town America he used to see on the silver screen in his youth, a place of honesty, decency and smiling good humour, but most of all a place that had not been, in Bryson's own words, "eaten by shopping malls". He travels through over thirty states looking for this fabled place, always finding something on which to comment along the way.

One particular treat, especially for those who have read, or will read, Bryson's later books, is that we get our first glimpses of his childhood family. Not, with the exception of his sandwich-making mother, in person, but Bryson has a gift for sketching people's characters in a few words, and by the end of the book we feel an affectionate nostalgia for many of them as well. This applies even to his father, a man so careful with his money that his son was surprised that he didn't make them root through litter bins to get lunch when on holiday, but in particular to his grandparents: a sequence in which Bryson goes back to what was once their house is remarkably moving.

The Lost Continent was published in 1989, itself two years after Bryson's actual journeys, and inevitably some of it has dated. Keeping in touch while out on the road in those pre-mobile phone, pre-internet days was much harder than it would be today, and the tale of how he tries in vain to find decent radio coverage of the 1987 stock market crash seems to come from another age entirely This problem only affects small parts of the book, however, and his complaints about the way over-commercialisation and the cult of the car have killed, or at least maimed, small-town American life remain as relevant today as ever they were, if not more so. It is of course an irony surely not lost on Bryson that he is making these complaints whilst driving many, many miles on a not strictly necessary odyssey of his own.

There is both comedy and poignancy to be found in the sometimes awkward combination of Bryson's progressive social and political opinions - he is not shy of making fun of one particular childhood Republican neighbour - and the nostalgia he displays for his 1950s upbringing, even for those parts of it - such as the existence of Amalgams - that were mostly in the mind in any case. He yearns for a simpler, less harsh America even as he bemoans the inability of many of his compatriots to move with the times, and every so often we see that he appreciates this awkwardness.

Although I like the rest of Bryson's travel books too, The Lost Continent is perhaps the one I find the most enjoyable to read. Because he was not already famous at the time of its writing, he seems to me to write in a slightly more relaxed, unforced style than in some of the later books. In those, just occasionally he seems to try a little too hard to be funny, something this naturally amusing writer does not need to do. Perhaps it also helps that at this point we are not yet over-familiar with some of his verbal tics and stock phrases ("it isn't really. I just made that up").

The America Bryson travelled through two decades ago has changed in many ways since that time, but not so much as to prevent the underlying truths and humour proving lasting. This book is both humorous and thought-provoking, sometimes managing both and bringing the reader up short with a wickedly accurate barb that brings an immediate laugh, followed a split-second later by a feeling that maybe laughing at this isn't quite the right thing to do, then another feeling that maybe that's right, but nevertheless it *is* funny. The Lost Continent is an essential read for both established Bryson fans and those who, somehow, have managed to miss it up until now.

[Review also published elsewhere, under the same username.] 

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