Book Review: The Kingdom By the Sea by Paul Theroux

 September 2026 is ENGLAND AS IT WAS month at the PorPor Books Blog

Book Review: 'The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around Great Britain' by Paul Theroux

5 / 5 Stars

And then it went bad again, with slapped-together bungalows and parking lots  and holiday camps called Silver Sands and Pontins. There were no people here, but the buildings made this part of Camber look blighted. The beach was undeniably lovely and unspoiled, but at this western end of it were peeling, collapsing huts and rusting caravans and weeds and even a dump full of twisted metal and yesterday’s plastic – this disfigurement was reminiscent of a third world country, where they did not know any better, and just let the detritus pile up as evidence that this rubbish was another aspect of civilization. 

 

It struck me that as time passed some countries with nothing in common but poverty would begin to resemble one another, because, while great civilizations are often vastly different and each culture is unique, everyone’s junk is just the same. 

  

'The Kingdom By the Sea: A Journey Around Great Britain' first was published in 1983. This paperback edition was issued by Washington Square Press in November, 1984.

 

From May to late July of 1982, the American author Paul Theroux (b. 1941) decided to circumnavigate the UK on foot and train. He started in Margate and followed the coast in a clockwise direction. He made a point of avoiding the more traveled or touristy locations, using the soon-to-be-abolished 'branch' train lines, keeping to country paths and byways, and staying at bed-and-breakfast establishments.

 

At that time the Falkland Islands war had begun, and it serves as a sort of sociopolitical backcloth to his travels. As he progresses on his journey, so, too, does the war effort. The war is something of a distraction from the severe economic malaise that grips the country.

 

For a man in his early forties, Theroux exhibits considerable stamina in the pages of ‘Kingdom,’ sometimes walking up to 20 miles in a day, this in ‘oiled’ hiking shoes, not $200 Salomon or Hoka hikers.

 

Reading of Theroux’s visits to the seaside towns and villages, which in the early 1980s were showing signs of wear, I can’t help but realize that these places nowadays are profiled in a lurid manner by the Sun: 

 

Sinister ‘Frankenstein heroin’ ripping through ‘Drug capital of the South’… forcing homeless into shanty towns on beach (this being Bournemouth) 

 

Skegness, in particular, wins the greatest censure from the Sun:

 

Skunk-addicted louts & crumbling homes… can UK’s ‘worst seaside town’ turn fortunes around as the ‘next Sandbanks’ ? 

 

We live in ‘worst’ seaside town ranked alongside North Korea – haters brand it a ‘pile of dirt’ but it’s NOT our fault

 

"There's not a soul to be seen on the pier." Skegness. Photo credited to Les Gibbon, The Sun, November 10, 2024

 

 And then there is Blackpool:

 

CRIME WAVE We live in UK’s most dangerous seaside town where ‘zombies’ roam streets & knife-wielding thieves terrorise shopkeepers

 

"Boarded-up homes in Blackpool." Photo credited to Steve Allen, The Sun, March 8, 2025

 

In his travels around the countryside Theroux notes the presence of what appear to be compounds of some type; large institutions “…surrounded by prison fences, with coils of barbed wire at the top. There were dog patrols and BEWARE signs stenciled with skulls. The main entrances were guarded and had turnstiles and a striped barrier that was raised to let certain vehicles through.......The whole affair reminded me a little of Jonestown (i.e., the compound in Guyana, where in 1978 over 900 people committed mass suicide).”

 

These compounds turn out to be the the Butlin's 'holiday camps.' Theroux decides to obtain a day pass, and visits the Butlin’s in Minehead in Somerset. Behind the grim exterior he finds a resort steeped in Englishness: “…a cricket pitch, a football field, a launderette, a supermarket, a bank, a betting shop, and a number of take-away food joints.” He also learns that Butlin’s is a favorite vacation spot for the many Britons who are ‘on the Dole,’ as a week’s stay (as it was in 1982, that is), at 178 pounds for a family of four, is affordable for families.

 

Curious, I went online and looked up the Minehead Butlin’s, which seems like quite the pleasant place, one well worth visiting (?!).

 

Theroux has a good eye for the quirky and unexpected places he encounters in his journeys, which is what the best travel writers do. He is even-handed in his appraisal of both the good and the bad to be witnessed in the UK. Among the good, is Tenby:

 

But Tenby was more than pretty. It was so picturesque, it looked like a watercolor of itself.

For the bad, there is a disturbing sight in Wigan, on a cold overcast June day, of Prole Children at play:

On the way out of Wigan on the train I looked out the window and saw a group of white-faced children. The rain had plastered their hair against their tiny heads, and their clothes were soaked, and their bare legs were dirty. They were struggling to pull down a fence at the back of a ruined house. They were busy and violent, they hammered at the pickets, they looked like small and dangerous men. When they saw the train they spat at it, and then they went on breaking the old fence.

Theroux's visit to Northern Island is bleak and depressing, as the 'Troubles' then were in full force. He finds redemption in Scotland, where Cape Wrath is one of the most beautiful and magical places he ever has seen. The Scots in that area have learned to bend, but not break, with the high (at times dangerous) winds and rain.

 

Theroux is not a foodie, and his remarks in 'Kingdom' simply state that the food he encountered was, in the main, not very good. At a cafe in Middlesbrough, he does abstain from the 'chip butty,' which apparently is this abomination: a sandwich made of french fries ?!

 

The nationwide rail strike, which began on July 4 and lasted two weeks, severely curtailed Theroux's travel plans, as he was forced to rely on county buses, which were overcrowded and rarely timely. As a result, the closing chapters of 'Kingdom' have a forlorn quality, particularly as the final destination, Southend, is deserted as a consequence of the strike:

 

This was high summer, but Southend was as empty as it had been in March.....Without trains, it was hard to get in or out....The physical link (e.g., to London), the railway, had been severed by the strike, and now Southend was revealed in this empty condition as a mixture of river rawness and sleazy elegance.  

Washington Post headline, July 15, 1982

Theroux's message in 'Kingdom' is that Britain is its railways, and when the railways serving the smaller communities are discontinued, it has the effect of transporting those smaller communities back in time, as it were, to the pre-railway era. With cars and petrol too dear for most families, and the bus service so dismal, many Britons were (at least, back in the midsummer of '82) being forced to stay close to home in the manner of the days of horse-and-buggy or bicycle.

 

'Kingdom' is one of the best travel books, and best observations of the UK, that I ever have read. Its 433 pages flow by in a smooth and informative manner (my only complaint is that the book has no maps). All in all, it's a solid Five Star read.

Mick Farren overview

Mick Farren's fiction factory

from the 'Peter Stanfield' blog 

Mick Farren (1943 - 2013) was a UK polymath: a member of rock / punk bands, a journalist for music and pop culture magazines, as well as a successful science fiction author. 

Farren's 1978 LP Vampire Stole My Lunch Money is considered a seminal punk record. Contributing musicians included Sonja Kristina (wife of Police drummer Stewart Copeland) and Chrissie Hynde (founder of The Pretenders and, like Farren, a writer for the New Musical Express).  

My review of Farren's novel 'The Text of Fesitval' is here; my review of 'Protectorate,' which I considered one of the top 10 sci-fi novels of the decade of the Eighties, is here.

At his blog, Pete Stanfield provides a lengthy overview of Farren's novels and stories from the 1970s. There are abundant scans of covers, as well as capsule summaries of the contents. This is one of the more comprehensive looks available on Farren's canon, and it you're a fan of his works and the sci-fi of the Seventies, it's well worth visiting. 

Book Review: Yes We Have No by Nik Cohn

September 2026 is ENGLAND AS IT WAS Month at the PorPor Books Blog 

   

Book Review: 'Yes We Have No', by Nick Cohn

4  / 5 Stars

'Yes We Have No: Adventures in Other England' first was published in the U.K. in 1999. This U.S. edition (357 pp.) was issued by Vintage Books in 2000.

After posting about 'Rock Dreams', I was curious about Cohn's other works, and selected this book for investigating. It's a collection of essays, some of which Cohn published in the Sunday Times, the Guardian, and other UK media, in the late 1990s. The essays are dedicated to what Cohn refers to as the 'other England', or the 'Republic', and it basically means the land of the Lumpen Proletariat, the lost, and the dispossessed.

Mindful that Cohn is a documented bullshitter, I read each essay with a skeptical frame of mind. Cohn coyly avoids assigning any identifiers to his writings: no dates (I infer the book's chronology starts in June, 1998, as Cohn references a mass drunk / riot in London following England's tie with Argentina in the World Cup) and no indication that the names given in the book are pseudonyms or not. 

American readers will need to make allowances for impenetrable references to U.K. pop culture:

Dettol. Mr. Kipling cakes display. The 'Bleak House' in the Dingle (someplace in Liverpool ?). 'The Road to Wigan Pier' (a novel). Marzine. Bumpf. Blagging. Top Shop tracksuits. Chares. Morris Cerullo. The 1985 Peace Convoy at Shipton Billinger (there was a riot, evidently). Hooray Henrys, with their beepers and beamers.

While the book starts in King's Cross in London, Cohn soon makes the acquaintance of a rather scattered young woman named Mary Carson, and the two of them go on a lengthy road trip to examine the places and people residing in Albion's less glamorous landscapes. Much of the travelogue is devoted to the North Country, and its vistas of industrial decay lying side-by-side with desperate attempts at modernization and economic revival. It's a sort of living testament to Sting's album The Soul Cages:

    The longer we stay in Newcastle, the worse we're flummoxed by its contradictions. We stroll the city centre, handsome as ever. The smooth facades of Granger and Grey Streets, sand-blasted, are the color of clotted cream on sunlit mornings, a faint rosy pink at dusk. Their glassed arcades are full of high-priced boutiques and designer kitsch. Then we cruise the Scotswood Road, a mile away. The sidestreets are rubbish dumps, piled with scrap metal and rotting floorboards. Those terraced houses that aren't bricked up have parts of their roofs missing, collapsing walls, and steel cages round the letter boxes, to guard against explosives.

    In North Shields, I take a walk round Meadowell Estate with a sixteen-year-old called Lee. There were riots here, a few years back. I ask Lee what caused them. 'Shite life,' he says.

In seeking out those bound to the louche life, Cohn interviews street thugs, alienated Pakis, addled pensioners, sex workers, drug addicts and alcoholics, and honest workmen befuddled by the disintegration of the society they grew up in. Some of the these individuals have what Cohn politely describes as 'somewhat tangled' histories.........

The final part of 'Yes We Have No' appropriately deals with the coming Millennium, which in the U.K. (as elsewhere in Western civilization) sparked a fervid revival in all manner of things religious. An encounter with a middle-aged man named Terry Hutcher, who clings desperately to the hope offered by evangelical Christianity, is one of the book's more poignant chapters:

    His home is in Shepherd's Bush, on an estate near White City. These names, in the context, take on a missionary ring, but the council flats where he and his wife Deanna live prove less than blessed. Used condoms litter the walkways; 'Smack My Bitch Up' snarls from an unseen ghetto-blaster. 'Welcome to the wilderness,' Ted says wryly, and ushers me indoors. A series of bolts and chains are shot home behind me. 'Deanna has baked a sponge,' I'm told.

    'It's all God's power, not mine,' says Ted modestly......He works at the same Oxford Street boutique as when they first got married, at virtually the same wage level, with no real hope of promotion. 'I'm totally dead-ended,' he says......Only Christ's love buoys him up.

'Yes We Have No' is a very readable book; Cohn uses a crisp, clean diction, keeps his interior monologues to the point, and has an eye for the incongruous and the transgressive.

I finished the book thinking that the Thirdworldization of the U.K. that Cohn (somewhat diffidently) portrays in the book was, as of the late 1990s, something peculiar to Western Europe. But now I realize that, while at the time an American like me could read Cohn's musing and sigh with relief: it can't happen here, that no longer is true. 

In 2026, large tracts of America, such as New York City, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Seattle, etc. are no different from what was taking place in Bradford, Kentish Town, Rochdale, Liverpool in 1998. If there is a message from 'Yes We Have No', it is a sobering one: what seemed dire in 1998, actually was better than what we see in 2026.......

Penthouse September 1986

Penthouse

September 1986 

September, 1986, and on FM radio I remember listening to the single 'Captain of Her Heart,' by the Swiss group Double. There were American DJs who pronounced the band name as 'dubble,' not knowing the accent was on the second syllable, i.e. 'doo-BLAY'.........
 

Elsewhere in the FM radio lineup, the top 10 featured the first real chart presence for a rap act, 'Walk This Way,' by Run DMC and Aerosmith.

 

The September 1986 issue of Penthouse features model and actress Lauren Hutton (b. 1943) on the cover. Apparently, Bob Guccione had purchased a collection of photos taken of Hutton in the 1960s (?) in '...the Long Island studio of Norman Nathan.' Even in low-res black and white, they make clear Lauren was someone special.

There's a sci-fi presence in this issue, albeit a rather mediocre one. First, there's a two-page advertisement from Doubleday's Science Fiction Book Club. Many of the newer titles are duds, featuring Product churned out by the bigger names in the field. But take hope ! William Gibson's sequel to 'Neuromancer,' 'Count Zero,' is a selection !

Isaac Asimov's novel 'Foundation and Earth' gets an excerpt, and an illustration by Gerard Di-Macchio. 

 

I've already ranted about Asimov's 1980s output, so what I'll do here is just put in an excerpt from the excerpt, as it were, and let it speak for itself...........note the split infinitive, and the use of the adverb 'merely,' twice in one para. And in the sentence beginning "To you," what does the pronoun 'it' refer to ?

 

     Bander continued, "There is, however, at least this. You death will be painless. I will merely heat your brains, mildly and drive them into inactivation. You will experience no pain. Life will merely cease. Eventually, when dissection and study are over, I will convert you to ashes in an intense flash of heat and all will be over."

 

    Trevize said, "If we  must die, then I cannot argue against having a quick and painless death, but why must we die at all, having committed no offense ?"

 

    "Your arrival was an offense."

 

    "Not on any rational ground, since we could not know it was an offense."

 

    "Society defines what constitutes an offense. To you, it my seem irrational and arbitrary, but to us it is not, and this is our world, - on which we have the full right  to say that in this and that, you have done wrong and deserve to die." 

 

Arthur C. Clark contributes the essay, 'Sex in the Year 2019.' He predicts 'male pregnancy,' which is somewhat accurate; self-stimulation devices that can be remotely controlled; drugs like Viagra; penile implants; and, sociologically speaking, further advancement of women's rights.

Showing up in a decidedly awkward way is 'Passage Through India,' a photoessay about 'championship windsurfer' Jacques Sotty, who decided to windsurf down the Ganges river, an 800-mile expedition. 

 

En route, Sotty experiences the sublime and the grotesque. In one stretch of the river he encounters rotting corpses; Hindus are supposed to cremate their dead and spread the ashes into the river, but sometimes, well..........relatives of the deceased are too poor to procure sufficient tinder, and the Dear Departed only partially are consumed. 

 

 

However, the essay takes a positive note, remarking that:

 

Ironically, these grotesque, dismembered limbs [i.e., the corpses] attract a beautiful species of dolphin, unknown in other regions of the world. According to Sotty, "Iridescent-pink dolphins travel hundreds of miles from the sea to feed on the cadavers. These are the only dolphins that eat human flesh."

I had to Google this, and in fact, yes, there are pink 'Ganges dolphins,' which are adapted to live in the silty waters of the river and are opportunistic feeders of animal / human flesh ! Let's go, dolphins !!!!!!!

 

Only in Penthouse in 1986 could you get the juxtaposition of a color photo of bloated, rotting Hindu corpse with abundant photos of tits and ass.......!!!!!!!!!! 

 

And then you have a profile article on Howard Stern, who in '86 was a DJ for New York City radio station WXRX. The quintessential 'Shock Jock' in those days, Stern was riding high in the era of peak FM radio.

 

This month Stern, accompanied by wife Beth, attended a function in Amagansett, New York.

photo from the NY Post

And that's a good way to close out our look at the men's literature, from 40 years ago.......... 

I Do the Rock

Tim Curry

1979 

What with all the eulogies and encomiums for the recent passing of UK actor Tim Curry (1946 - 2026), few have referenced his 1979 LP Fearless.

 

I was never a Rocky Horror fan; the Rocky Horror people were at the bottom of the food chain. But I do remember listening to the single from Fearless, 'I Do the Rock,' on WAAL FM radio in my hometown in upstate New York in the summer of 1979. 

 

Along with Mike Nesmith's 'Cruising,' from that same time in that same year, it had an irreverent, quirky, campy quality that made it stand out among the other AOR tunes on the station. Kind of like a more listenable Frank Zappa composition........

 

As for Fearless, well, I can't call it a gem of late 70s rock n roll, but it has a more listenable quality that so much of the stuff out right now on the Spotify Top 40. And there you have it......... 

Book Review: Compulsion by Shaun Hutson

September 2026 is ENGLAND AS IT WAS month at the PorPor Books Blog

  

Book Review: 'Compulsion' by Shaun Hutson

2 / 5 Stars 

‘Compulsion’ was published by Pan Books UK in 2002. At 497 pages it’s a thick chunk of a paperback, but the font is large, and the novel shorter in length than it would seem at first look.

I don’t usually review novels or short stories published after the late 1980s, but with ‘Compulsion’ I was interested to see what Shaun Hutson is doing with his post-horror / Paperbacks from Hell output. I found his 1993 serial killer novel ‘Deadhead’ to be reasonably entertaining, if not particularly imaginative, so let’s see what the case is with ‘Compulsion’……..

The novel is set in Kempston, 30 miles north of London:

With its estates of 1950s houses and flats, it was depressingly similar throughout its length and breadth. There had been the inevitable encroachment of Barrett homes in the early seventies and more modern houses had been erected for those who opted for the millstone of a mortgage. But for the most part, Kempston’s council residents dwelt in the same kind of accommodation their parents had known.

The antagonists are a trio of scummy juvenile delinquents: Carl Thompson, Graham Brown, and Donna Freeman. They lead a small group of juvies who delight in burglary, car theft, vandalism, and the occasional assault with an edged weapon. When not occupied with these pastimes, the juvies like to torture small animals. Brown is guilty of a number of violations carried out at the Howard Road Secondary School, but since he is a child, the School’s administrators are helpless to apply any sort of meaningful discipline.

The protagonists of ‘Compulsion’ are Veronica ‘Ronnie’ Porter, the administrator of Shelby House Residential Home, and its nine aged residents. At Shelby House life is reasonably pleasant, with staff handing out daily meds to the oldsters, while said oldsters are engaged in watching TV, doing crossword puzzles, listening to LPs from past eras, and playing parlor games.

When by chance Carl and Donna have a hot-n-heavy makeout session in the seat of a stolen car, whilst parked near Shelby House, Carl sees the Home and gets an idea: the residents “….must be fucking loaded.”

This observation sets in motion a campaign of terror, instigated by Thompson and his gang, against the tenants of Shelby House.

As the violence escalates the police are singularly ineffectual, as the vandals strike at night and even if identified, are shielded from prosecution due to their age. If Ronnie and the Shelby residents are not to be driven away from their home, they will need to mount a defense. A defense that will rely on payment in kind………

For me, ‘Compulsion’ was a less than engaging read. This mainly is due to the novel’s excessive length, padded as it is with labored exposition on the psychological and emotional states of the characters. As well, Hutson relies on a  clipped prose style; chapters are only three or four pages in length.

And most of the prose is related using a single-sentence diction.

Like this.  

Hutson intended this device to increase the novel’s suspenseful nature.

It might have worked in a short story.

But in a novel, it quickly becomes tedious.

Not until page 435 do the Shelby House oldsters settle on retribution and here Hutson does deliver some impactful splatterpunk. And the novel’s closing chapter ends things on an ambiguous note, one that avoids the traditional moral comforts one usually encounters in crime / suspense novels.

While ‘Compulsion’ has an interesting premise, I feel that dedicated crime / suspense authors (e.g., Max Allan Collins, Joe Lansdale, James Elroy, Ralph Dennis, etc.) could have done better with the premise. When all is said and done, I’m fine with giving ‘Compulsion’ a Two Star Rating.