The Books: “The Kingdom by the Sea” (Paul Theroux)

Next book on the history/travel shelf:

Paul Theroux’s <The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain. This, to my taste, is one of Paul Theroux’s funniest and best books. Maybe I feel that way because I’ve BEEN to a lot of the places that Theroux describes in his book, so I can nod in recognition, and go, “Man, he so described that perfectly!” He sticks to coastal areas – and he does Britain, Ireland, and Scotland. He stays in B&Bs, talks to people, he goes to visit transgendered travel author (and one of his idols) Jan Morris who lives in Wales – had never met her before – and so just had to knock on her door, and follow her around. Beautiful chapter. Her books are what inspire him, her observations about travel, and journeys … They have a nice meeting. It’s very cool. His chapter on Belfast is chilling – he doesn’t mince words. He was there in the early 80s, and he felt the sickness of the place, he felt that the place was so sick that he “never wanted to leave”. Belfast is having a resurgence now – as I just experienced – but his chapters on it describe the underbelly of all of that, what lies beneath the surface. Toxicity, hatred, rigidity, etc. He pulls no punches. Just because he’s a visitor doesn’t mean that he feels he has to be NICE.

I’m going to post an excerpt from his chapter on Cape Wrath in Scotland. I have never been there, but his words make me want to go. I also think it’s some of his best writing, this little excerpt.

From The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain.

Some fantasies prepare us for reality. The sharp steep Cuillins were like mountains in a storybook — they had a dramatic, fairy-tale strangeness. But Cape Wrath on the northwest coast of Scotland was unimaginable. It was one of those places where, I guessed, every traveler felt like a discoverer who was seeing it for the first time. There are not many such places in the world. I felt I had penetrated a fastness of mountains and moors, after two months of searching, and I had found something new. So even the old, overscrutinized kingdom had a secret patch of coast! I even liked its ambiguous name. I did not want to leave.

There were other people in the area: a hard-pressed settlement of sheep farmers and fishermen, and a continuity of dropouts making pots and jewelry and quilts at the edge of Balnakell. There were anglers and campers, too, and every so often a brown plane flew overhead and dropped bombs on one of the Cape Wrath beaches, where the army had a firing range. But the size of the place easily absorbed these people. They were lost in it, and as with all people in a special place, they were secretive and a little suspicious of strangers.

Only the real natives were friendly. They were the toughest Highlanders and they did not match any Scottish stereotype I knew. They did not even have a recognizably Scottish accent. They were like white crows. They were courteous, hospitable, hard-working, and funny. They epitomized what was best in Scotland, the strong cultural pride that was separate from political nationalism. That took confidence. They were independent, too — thrawn was the Lowlands word for their stubborn character. I admired their sense of equality, their disregard for class, and they gentle way they treated their children and animals. They were tolerant and reliable, and none of this was related to the flummery of bagpipes and sporrans and tribalistic blood-and-thunder that Sir Walter Scott had turned into the Highland cult. What I liked most about them was that they were self-sufficient. They were the only people I had seen on the whole coast who were looking after themselves.

It was a shire full of mountains, with spaces between — some valleys and some moors — and each mountain was separate. To describe the landscape it was necessary to describe each mountain, because each one was unique. But the soil was not very good, the sheep were small, the grass thin, and I never walked very far without finding a corpse — loose wool blowing around bones, and the bared teeth of a skull.

“Look,” a shepherd named Stephen said to me on one of those hillsides.

A buzzard-sized bird was circling.

“It’s a hooded crow,” Stephen said. “They’re desperate creatures. In a place like this — no shelter, no one around for miles — they find a lamb and peck its eyes out. It’s lost, it can’t get to its mother, it gets weak. Then the hooded crows – so patient up there — dive low and peck it to pieces. They’re a terrible bird.”

He said that it was the predatory crows, not the weather, that killed the lambs. It was a cold place, but not excessively so. In winter there was little snow, though the winds were strong and the easterlies were usually freezing gales. There were always birds in the wind — crows and hawks and comic squawking oystercatchers with long orange bills and singing larks and long-necked shags and stuttering stonechats.

It could be an eerie landscape, especially on a wet day, with all the scattered bones gleaming against the dun-colored cliffs and the wind scraping against the heather. It surprised me that I was happy in a place where there were so few trees — there were none at all here. It was not picturesque and it was practically unphotographable. It was stunningly empty. It looked like a corner of another planet, and at times it seemed diabolical. But I liked it for all these reasons. And more important than these, my chief reason for being happy was that I felt safe here. The landscape was like a fierce-looking monster that offered me protection; being in Cape Wrath was like having a pet dragon.