Amazon.co.uk
Events, how people look and what they say are recorded faithfully and with master of observation Bill Bryson's wonderful facility for making you laugh out loud, there are plenty of reasons for doing so. His running commentary on a radio broadcast cricket match, a game about which he knows nothing, is brilliantly inventive. There's not a single actual word or expression associated with the game but the nuance is stunning. Spiky conversations with his English producer friend as they drive to Ayres Rock, the sighting of a rotary clothes-line in the depths of the outback, confrontations with receptionists and waiters, a beer-drinking man at the bar of the Nambucca telling him "Dining room's closed mate. The chef's crook. Must have ate some of his own cooking" and a full tuckerbag more, are entertainingly, albeit rather hastily, delivered by the reader. --Running time 3 hours
-- Lyn TookAmazon.co.uk Review
For a start, there's the oddly nasty fauna and flora. Barely a page of Down Under is without its lovingly detailed list of lethal antipodean critters: sociopathic jellyfish, homicidal crocs, toilet-dwelling death-spiders, murderous shrubs (yes, shrubs). Bryson's absorbing and informative portrait is of a terrain so intractably vast, a land so climatically extreme, it seems expressly designed to daunt and torment humankind.
This very user-unfriendliness throws up another Aussie paradox. If the country is so hostile how come the natives are so laid back, so relaxed? As Bryson shuffles from state to state, he seeks the key to the uniquely cool Australian character and finds it in Australia's tragicomic past, her genetic seeding of convicts, explorers, gold diggers, outlaws. This is a country of lads and mates, of boozy gamblers--nowadays mellowed by sunshine and sporting success.
Down Under is a fine book. So it may not be quite as deliciously malicious as Bryson's The Lost Continent, nor as laugh-out-loud funny as Neither Here Nor There. But so what? A Bill Bryson on cruise control is better than most travel writers on turbodrive. --Sean Thomas
