Neither Here Nor There by Bill Bryson

When my girlfriend went to Germany this summer, her tales of Germany’s quirks made me think immediately of Bill Bryson and one of his early books, Neither Here Nor There. Realizing that I last read it before the start of this meme back in 2005, I thought it would be the perfect time to dust it off and enjoy it all over again.

There are startling bits about Neither Here Nor There, especially if you’ve read a lot of Bryson’s more recent work. It’s downright bawdy at times, which doesn’t bother me, but does come as a bit of a shock. The only other book which approaches this style is A Walk in the Woods, I suppose because these are both largely narrative books, rather than the more detached kind of exposition you might find in one of his books about language.

Neither Here Nor There is a travelogue of Bryson’s trip across Europe in the early 1990s. It’s a strange hybrid of the “present” and flashbacks of the author’s first trip(s) across Europe, one of the times with a crass young man named Katz, the sort of comic-relief boor that enjoys “Pull my finger” jokes and thinks that volume is a sufficient substitute for the inability to speak a foreign tongue.

Young Bryson (and Katz) tends to chase women, smoke semi-legal hash in Amsterdam, and party into the wee hours of the morning in clubs that are hip in a way they can only be in Europe. Latter-day Bryson mostly wanders around the cobble-stone streets of Old Europe alone, either in a “I’m a tourist, but not an annoying one” sort of way, or a “What kind of strange, alien people are you?” sort of way. It becomes clear that he has an undying love for the bucolic Europe of his childhood imagination, satisfied most thoroughly by small Italian villages where everyone knows everyone else, and you can sit for hours at a Bistro, drinking coffee, and alternating between reading thick tomes about the Bubonic Plague and people-watching.

More broadly, Bryson laments the inevitable conundrum of travel-friendly Europe: tourism thoroughly kills the small-town, Old-World charm that makes these places worth visiting in the first place. The author starts in the godforsaken frozen north, looking for the Aurora Borealis, works his way through the middle of Europe, which he comes to find is largely overrun with touristy crap, finding only a few quaint places which slake his thirst for the pastoral, being utterly bored in Switzerland, which apparently has all the charm of a sterile cotton swab, and then becoming entirely depressed when visiting Eastern Europe, which at that time was still either suffering under Communism, or suffering from the transition from it.

Bryson, inexplicably, finds a particular joy in the sensation of being utterly at odds with his surroundings when on vacation. Instead of being a source of stress, not speaking the local language appears fun to him (or so it would seem from his narration). Outside of the usual travel literature, it’s strange to find someone, especially an American, who isn’t an accidental tourist, traveling abroad while simultaneously trying to make his/her destination as much as possible like the place he/she just left. Bryson likes museums, long walks, good beer, good (but not too exotic) food, and downtown cafés. Out of that, he manages to make some of the most amusing travel writing I’ve ever had the pleasure to read.

As I will invariably say with anything by Bryson, you’ll do yourself a favor by reading this. Neither Here Not There is funny, informative, occasionally touching, and utterly difficult to put down.

The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron

In all the years I’ve been reading Bill Bryson, I’m surprised that I’ve never heard or read anyone compare him to Robert Byron, the famed travel writers in the 1930s who died during the war. He takes a similarly anecdotal approach to his writing, and with an acerbity that puts Bryson to shame.

The Road to Oxiana documents British journalist Robert Byron’s trip through the Middle East, hitting all of the major places—Tehran, Beirut, Palestine, &c.. Importantly, Byron is there only because of his fascination with Middle Eastern architecture—the only parts of the book, in fact, where his tone is anything but contemptuous is when he’s covering just such a topic—and in fact has little patience for either the native inhabitants or the European rulers (this book takes place after the post-war division of the region among various European powers: in fact, since a lot of Byron’s interactions are with the foreign inhabitants, the Middle East hardly seems as though it’s Middle Eastern. It’s like a great big block party for the English and French.

What really grabs me about The Road to Oxiana is what a smörgåsbord of styles Byron uses, and his sheer love of rhetorical invention. The book veers from terse journal-style recordkeeping, to long play-style passages which use musical notation to show volume changes, to winding descriptions of edifices where Byron gets downright wondrous.

The book is, essentially, travel writing. Thus, it may appeal to fans of the genre: my love of Bill Bryson might be part of the reason why The Road of Oxiana resonated with me, although Byron is significantly more acerbic than Bryson ever gets, and this constant disparagement of everything and everyone ceases to be amusing and becomes trying very early on. It is no wonder that Byron had very few friends to mourn him when he was killed during WWII. It is only through the efforts of modern travel writers that this book is available at all: Paul Fussell, who provides the introduction to the book, was instrumental in its rerelease in the early 1980s. One can see how the appeal of a book about the Middle East—especially the Middle East circa 1933—would wane somewhat in modern America, but the book really is a jewel of writing, filled with language both hilarious and beautiful.