Bill Bryson - At Home, a Short History of Private Life

review by Malcolm
From the Back Cover
What does history really consists of? Centuries of people quietly going about their daily business – sleeping, eating, having sex, endeavouring to get comfortable.

And where did all these normal activities take place?

At home.


My Review.

I like Bill Bryson and his writing (e.g. Notes from a Small Island) and when I heard about his At Home I put it on my 2010 Christmas list. Bill Bryson is an American writer who spent many years in the UK working as a journalist before returning to America (see: Notes from a Big Country) and finally coming back to settle in the UK where he bought an old rectory in Norfolk. He is a fervent antilitter campaigner and also will be known to many on the Isles of Scilly from his celebrity appearances at the sadly defunct Tresco Marathon.

I have lived in several houses of a similar age to Bill Bryson's rectory in both rural and urban settings. I remember the delights of discovering working servants bells, concealed second staircases, coal holes, finding doodlings on plaster beneath the wallpaper possibly from the famous artist who previously occupied the house, working out how to mend sash windows, little grassy back walkways to the village church lovingly restored by Thomas Hardy, all that sort of stuff.

At Home was hopefully going to be along similar lines particularly from the interview I'd seen Bill Bryson give on BBC about sunken churches in English graveyards. Sadly no, At Home proved to be 1000 detailed facts of British and American history that I never really wanted to know in the first place. Facts tenuously applied to the layout of Bill Bryson's house. When he describes The Study he does not apply many of his thoughts to the sermons that may have been written there but more to the fact that they seem to catch a lot of mice in there, and this opens a whole thread of vermin control without which the globe would no doubt be covered in a 10 mile deep layer of mouse fur within a year! And the Attic, for instance, opens up a thread on the life of Charles Darwin and several famous archaeologists. In mitigation, I can identify with some parts, Mount Vernon for example, the beautiful country home of George Washington which I visited in the 1980’s – that was probably in the chapter on The Stairs – ah no it was the Plum Room – not a room for storing or eating fruit just a reference to its colour! The Stairs seems to be a lot about poisonous wallpaper, the formulae for calculating the dimensions of each step and the government statistics for stair deaths!
It isn't that the facts Bill Bryson delivers to us are all uninteresting they just don't seem to be very relevant to the concept of being at home and that gets a bit tedious. Mention the loo and he goes off into reams of delight over the Black Death, plague, cholera, cremation versus burial, London sewers and so on. Grand house designs and designers, canals, lightbulb inventors, landscape gardeners, the Industrial Revolution all feature, lovingly described in yawningly miniscule detail! Even the index and “Further Reading” is over 50 pages long!

In my opinion the young, incisive, witty author who brought us Notes from a Small Island in 1995 seems suddenly to have become the Party Bore!

Malcolm Martland, broadcast on RadioScilly 107.9 FM, 1 September 2011