Review of "All Together Now?: One Man's Walk in Search of His Father and a Lost England" by Mike Carter

 

Not a brilliant book, but quite a good one. It's a "journey across England" book, and they all have some things in common - the writer-traveller meets some nice people and has heartwarming experiences, and he/she meets some nasty people and has some horrible experiences. Sometimes people are welcoming and kind, sometimes the accomodation is really awful. The balance between these sets the feeling for the book.

But this is also a personal story, because Mike Carter is doing the journey to achieve some sort of reconciliation with his now-dead father Peter Carter, a Communist Party and UCATT militant who organised the early 1980s People's March for Jobs. I may be reading things backwards, but even at the time I was a bit underwhelmed with this project, and I think I was right...it feels and felt like an exercise in supplication, not militancy or direct action.

The parts of the book that are most moving are where he deals with the personal stuff - his estrangement from his father and his family via his brief bit of upwards social mobility, and it's interesting when he sets that in the narrative of the working class as a whole. Other parts read they've been cut and pasted from features in The Guardian...the increase in income and wealth inequality, the unaffordability of housing, the largely pointless expansion in higher education vs vocational education...foreign ownership of prime housing and strategic industries...it might have been better if he'd put that all in one place, or left it out all together and concentrated on his observations and personal reflections.

As regards what he finds on his journey, it strikes me that he is conflating several different things, al of which contribute to how shit a tour round most British small town are, but which are not at all the same. First, going on foot across the country you are going to experience a lot of "liminal spaces" - bits that are not for public view, like janitor's cupboards and service ducts. You find these in even the nicest public spaces if you look hard enough, and they are rarely pretty - it's part of what I hate about hotels. If you write about this, and if you pay attention, then things are going to look a bit grim.

Second, he is travelling through a country that is in relative industrial and economic decline. Britain was never going to be top nation for ever, and even if all the urban planning had been great and the inequality addressed by a benign and well-funded social democratic state, things would still have got worse relative to other places and countries.

Third, technological changes - especially the internet and online retail - mean that the face of town centres would have changed whatever. Online shopping is mainly a better experience; local shops can't afford to carry the inventory of everything that I might want, and it's unusual if the staff can help a customer much or even know what's in stock. And the cost of real estate - related of course to another thing that is wrong with Britain - means that online shopping is also going to be cheaper, even with delivery charges. So many local shops are going to close, and thus far what is taking their place is stuff that can't be delivered online - hairdressers, nail bars, tattoo places...