Merrie England

Merrie England: A Journey through the Shire by Joseph Pearce, 136 pages

Merrie England describes a trip through modern England in search of the eternal England, a quest for the country's "soil-soul", "the plush, solid ground of primal realities."  On foot and by train, Joseph Pearce travels from Norwich through Ely, Peterborough, and York to Lindisfarne, then west along the Scottish border to the Lake District and south along the Welsh border before cutting east to Oxford, London, and finally the shrine to Our Lady at Walsingham.  But Pearce does not travel alone, he takes with him Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Newman, Hopkins, Chesterton, Tolkien, and many others besides.  Though they may appear to be ghosts, they are in some ways more alive than anyone living today.

Pearce obviously takes a portion of his inspiration from the travel books of Hilaire Belloc (The Cruise of the "Nona", The Path to Rome), the subject of one of his well-received biographies, but he lacks Belloc's light touch.  Too often Pearce comes across as a lecturer rather than a convivial companion - he spends paragraphs excoriating post-industrial ugliness where Belloc would have dismissed it with a contemptuous wave of his hand and moved on to more interesting matters.  Likewise, Pearce's choice to make his traveler an anonymous "pilgrim", while it may heighten audience identification, wears out its welcome as the reader is repeatedly told what the pilgrim thinks and feels - a walk with Joseph Pearce would doubtless be more interesting than having Joseph Pearce describe a walk anyone might take.  Then, too, while there are numerous illustrations of places mentioned in the text, there is no map, a strange omission in a book partially inspired by Tolkien.