Bill Bryson: Neither Here Nor There
The Irish Times November 23 1991 
Bill Bryson’s love affair with over here began back in the heady days of Europe on $5 a day, in the company of Katz, the frat-man who barfed and bonked his way out of middle America.
Twenty years later, Bryson is on the road again, wisely solo this time, taking us on an irreverent romp around all the watering holes and a few dried-up puddles. He begins with the northern lights at Hammerfest, the northernmost town in Europe, and drops us off at Istanbul, exhausted and none the worse for wear. In between, he’s mighty good company and extremely funny.
His Travels in Europe is sprinkled with information which is of absolutely no use to anyone. Bryson is the kind of traveller who reads the labels on rubber dolls in Amsterdam’s red-light district, and then provides a structuralist-functionalist comparison with those on Hamburg’s Reeperbahn which leaves Roland Barthes at the starting gate.
We learn that Liechtenstein is the world’s largest producer of sausage skins and false teeth. Or that it’s illegal, in Norway, for a barman to serve you a fresh drink until you have finished the previous one. None of this will further the cause of European unity, but it will leave the reader, laughing his way into 1992, happy not to be living in Brussels, “the briefcase capital of Europe’, or in Brig, “the kind of place where the red-light district would be in a phone box”.
Unhappily, Ireland is left out of the author’s itinerary, but there’s a riveting chapter on Sunday in Liechtenstein.
With not a language in his head but English, the author negotiates waiters and bellhops in a dozen cultures and manages not to have a good word to say about any of them. The Italians are “without any commitment to order”. The Swedes’ capacity for pleasure has “all the gusto of an undertakers’ convention”. He despises the French not because they can’t make tea, but because they don’t say thank-you:
I’ve always felt that, since it was us that liberated them – and let’s face it, the French army couldn’t beat a girls’ hockey team – they ought to give all Allied visitors to the country a book of coupons good for free drinks in Pigalle and a ride to the top of the Eiffel Tower.
It’s the Europe we know and hate to love: endless queues round museums; gypsy pick-pockets; poker-faced officials; steamy couples in long embraces; the brittle crunch of syringes in the parks.
The tail-end of this hilarious scramble across Europe captures Yugoslavia and Bulgaria in the rigor mortis of Communism just before the system caved in altogether. Bryson looks forward to a Sofia “full of Pizza Huts and Laura Ashleys and the streets clogged with BMWs”. It’s what we suspected all along; political science boils down to a bit of Saturday afternoon shopping. Though he won’t make the briefcase capital with this book, someone should invite Bill Bryson to inject some life into next year’s Eurovision Song Contest.