The Lost Continent-Bill Bryson

                                                                                                                                                      Travel

The Lost Continent-Travels in Small Town America

Bill Bryson

            Bill Bryson comes from a small town in mid-west America, Des Moines in Iowa district. When he grew up, he went to England and worked there for many years. In his mid-thirties he had an urge to visit the America of his childhood, the America of small towns which lived in his imagination, embellished by the movies he had watched in tons in his youth; an America like picture of New England where he thought there ‘was nothing but Maple trees and white churches and old guys in checked shirts sitting around iron stoves in country general stores swapping tall tales and spitting in cracker barrel’. This town was actually an amalgamation of his many desires and he fictitiously named it Amalgam. He drove 14,000 miles in America in search of Amalgam but all he found were vast shopping arcades, burger joints, huge cemented parking lots, cheap gasoline stations and motels. This book chronicles this journey in his uniquely funny and irreverent style. His humour is matchless. Each page and each paragraph is replete with his extraordinarily witty observations and remarks: during a long drive ‘your buttock grow numb and begin to feel as if they belong to another person’, in a dreary landscape you reach towns with imaginary names like Dry Glutch, Cactus City, Coma, Doldrum, Smelville and Fartville, outside his sleepy home town Des Moines a sign board that says, ‘Welcome to Des Moines, this is what death is like’ It doesn’t he has just made it up. You wonder every now and then, how a person can be so funny, how he can invent funny metaphors and wisecracks for all situations and personalities. It is absolutely incredible.

            Bill Bryson is acutely observant as he drives through the American towns and cities. He is critical of the excessive indulgence of Americans with material comforts. He rues the lack of learning in the lives of American students. ‘In my day the principal concerns of university students were sex, smoking, dope, rioting and learning. Learning was something you did when the first three were not available, but at least you did it.’ But the youth of today concern themselves only with ‘sex and keeping their clothes looking nice’. All this criticism and many facts presented in the book are not delivered in the donnish, dry as bone indictments, but in a brotherly tone. Bryson’s capability to poke fun at himself and his family continuously, absolves him of any charge of being prudish and haughty, as he mocks one and all in his books.

            His language is elegant yet effortless and pleasant to read. His similes while describing nature or people are most ingenious and enjoyable; young healthy students in an university campus look ‘wholesome as a bottle of milk’, in the air-conditioned buildings air is ‘always as cool and clean as a freshly laundered shirt’, on a beach he watches waves as they fall on ‘the beach like exhausted swimmers’.

            This is a fabulous piece of travel writing from a sensitive, highly intelligent, utterly original and incomparably funny author. It is impossible to put down the book once started and the end finds you pining for more such stuff from the author. Fortunately, Bill Bryson possesses a fertile mind with a prolific hand and has authored many books. God bless him!