Review: The Full English - Stuart Maconie ***

By Brian Clegg

I don’t think I’ve ever read a book before where I was struck by such an immediate sense of deja vu – because the chapter headings in Stuart Maconie’s The Full English were the same as the ones in a book I’d read only the week before. I had bought J. B. Priestley’s English Journey (inspired by a reference to it in another book) in the same batch of shopping as Maconie’s latest English socio-travel title without realising that Priestley’s book was the inspiration for Maconie’s. It’s not necessary to read Priestley first… but I did really gain something by doing so.

The book retraces Priestley’s journey of 1933/4. Maconie is, without doubt, the perfect writer to do this. Like Priestley, he is a northerner who has moved down south. Like Priestley, he has a balance of socialist principles and liking a bit of the good life. And he’s a big fan of Priestley’s original. But, strangely, there are some problems with the format. It’s limiting: Maconie visits places he’s written about before and sometimes doesn’t really do much while he’s in any particular location. The oddest failing is that one of the most interesting bits of the 1930s predecessor was Priestley’s descriptions of his visits to various factories, but Maconie doesn’t do this at all. That was a real shame.

This doesn’t make this a bad book – it’s not. It was really interesting to see Maconie struggling with the less pleasant and politically acceptable aspects of English Journey – a bit of a case of never meet, or in this case re-trace the journey of, your hero. And unlike Priestley, who didn’t even make much of an effort on his visit, Maconie quite likes Swindon, for which I will forgive him a lot. We also get some of Maconie’s excellent interactions with and overhearing of random people in the locations he visits, plus his often enticing descriptions of the food he eats on his travels. (To be fair, he has a huge advantage here over Priestley, as the food is so much better in England than it was in 90 years ago. Apart from one hotel, the places Maconie stays are far better too.)

The best part by far is towards the end, when he reaches Lincolnshire and Norfolk. Here Maconie is more on form, particularly on Skegness – even though neither he nor Priestley visits, he passes through on the train and reminisces about his childhood visits to various Butlins holiday camps – and Boston which must be one of the strangest towns in England for reasons he describes well. He’s also excellent in Norwich, though he does sing the praises of UEA’s brutalist Lasdun Wall without pointing out that it is a maintenance nightmare and falling apart.

I honestly expected Maconie’s version of this trip round an eccentric English itinerary to be better than Priestley’s, and in some ways it is. I prefer Maconie’s writing style and (after all) he is from Lancashire rather than Yorkshire. The best of Maconie shines through when he tears apart the terrible mine owners of the Victorian North East (and suggests very reasonably that statues of these ‘noble’ buffoons should be torn down). But, for me, this is the weakest of all Maconie’s socio-travel books. It feels like something that seemed like a good idea when it was commissioned, but that proved hard to make work in practice.

I’m still a big fan of Maconie’s writing. I’ll be pre-ordering his next book without a qualm. But this one was a bit of a let-down.

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.