Review: England, their England

England, their England by A.G. Macdonell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A warm and affectionate comedy. A Welsh publisher commissions Donald Cameron, a young Scot, who he met in a pillbox in Belgium during World War I, to write a book about the English from the point of view of an outsider. The Welshman's theory is that they are a nation of poets (which is what many people would say about the Welsh); Donald thinks, at least at one point, that they don't have a national character, "they're all different". But they are probably mad, and definitely (in many cases) kind, although he doesn't shy away from highlighting the exceptions. The fox-hunting chapter is particularly biting, and a masterpiece of "show, don't tell" applied to satire.

With many sparkling comic moments, this book somehow manages to combine brilliant satire with warmth, even sentimentality. It's well known for the description of the village cricket match, and deservedly so, but there are plenty of other wonderful chapters: the country-house stay where an eccentric English friend of the hero "helps" him by ringing up and pretending to be various important people leaving messages for him with people who'll be impressed that he knows those important people, leading to conversations which poor Donald finds either incomprehensible or deeply embarrassing; the hotel fire, in which the English partygoers trapped on the roof behave with complete calm under the command of the Major-General; the fox-hunting chapter already mentioned; the episode at the League of Nations, an organization the author worked for at one time, where the English delegate gives speeches that are so careful to say nothing that they get attached to the wrong issues and nobody notices. There are some marvelous characters, too: the English landowner who, after agreeing with his wife that they won't collect the full rent (or, in some cases, any rent) from tenants who are having a hard time of it, insists vehemently that he's a good businessman; the Yorkshire engineer who has been all over the world delivering machines and teaching the recipients to use them, sometimes for years at a time; the varied literary eccentrics; the secretly virtuous film star, true to the precepts of her father, the vicar; the noncommittal trio of young men who work at the League of Nations, and whose answer to any question is "yes and no"; the young man and woman, siblings, who have no topics of conversation and only one adjective at any given time (currently the adjective is "grim").

It closes with a sentimental chapter set at Winchester, where the author (but not his character) went to school, in which one of the boys (or "men," as they're known at Winchester; this particular man is about 12 years old) explains that a piece of terminology used at the school is based on something that used to happen "until quite recently," and when pressed clarifies that by this he means 70 or 80 years ago. Given that Winchester was founded in 1382, 70 or 80 years does count as recent in terms of its history. (I went to a school founded 5 years before I started there, so by the time I left I had witnessed half its history to that point, and the country I was born in was only founded in 1840, so it's hard to imagine what it would be like to go to a school with such a depth of history.) I was reminded of Wodehouse's Psmith in the City , where the viewpoint character visits Wodehouse's old school (which is not the character's old school).

I was left with the impression that Donald thinks that the English are kind largely because he is kind. A lot of the time, he has no idea what is going on, what his English acquaintances are talking about, or why they are doing what they're doing, but he struggles on as best he can.

If the book has a fault, it's that it's very much about its own time (which is also a strength, if you're interested in getting an insight into that time), and a lot of the contemporary references have lost their resonance in almost a century. But you can generally pick up from context what's being referenced, at least in general terms, and the Wikipedia feature on my Kindle was helpful in many cases too.

Genuinely witty in its observations and phrasing, with hilarious set-pieces and mostly affectionate portraits of a dozen varieties of eccentricity and oddness, this is a book for fans of Wodehouse and Jerome K. Jerome, or anyone who wants a comedic exploration of the England of the 1920s.

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