Kingdom by the Sea (Essential Modern Classics) (Collins Modern Classics)

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Now that Bob's girlfriend is dead, a vow he once made to her takes on macabre new implications; PW said, ``Westall's tale is good spooky fun--and thought-provoking as well. But his keen eye sees beyond the war hysteria to realize that Britain’s problem in 1982 was unemployed people and closed mines, factories, and businesses.

And as he encounters new characters, and forges relationships with them, their time together is temporary.Theroux is a wonderful observer, open to experience, a lover of people and customs, but doesn't hold back when he dislikes a landscape that has been ravaged or the ugliness of a town (e.

Britain has always been defined by the sea, he says, and no place in the kingdom is more than 85 miles from the ocean. It's just tedious -- a hundred pages in, and you may be wondering why this grey misanthrope even gets out of bed in the morning but you're still not interested in his martyred quest around the British coastline. His home had been bombed, leaving him an orphan, and so he went to the beach to find a place to sleep, not wishing to be in an orphanage.

Different children can handle different things and I strongly recommend parents of impressionable children read this slender volume first.

Nobody in their right mind reads Theroux for factual information, historical background or statistics.Clearly, the poor boy goes through an awful time and it absolutely demonstrates the horrors of the war, but I just couldn't sympathise with him at all.

The Kingdom by the Sea, Theroux's grumpy, funny account of this journey, was published the following year (1983) and caused outrage in many of the seaside towns the author had passed through and seemingly written off. Theroux must have known that these holiday camps are a sick joke throughout the rest of the country, catering to a small section of the dwindling working class and its teen-age children. We also share information about your use of our site with our social media, advertising and analytics partners. Theroux speculates that it would be an impolite question in a place where so many people were on the dole. Summary: Beautifully written, gloomy, depressive and funny at the same time, this exploration of coastal UK at the time of the Falkland War as a metaphor for a crumbling empire is now a travel classic.Paul Theroux had written several travel/train books, including The Great Railway Bazaar, before he decided to learn more about Great Britain, the country in which he had been living for the past 10 years. One of my favourite parts of the book was his journey on the post bus through Sutherland where he experiences rural life up close. I hope that if he repeated his journey today he would find that things had changed since the 1980s and cycling would be considered viable. The white faces of the Humphreys, who lived at number five, peered palely from the door of their shelter.