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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
should hang in every pub toilet,
By
This review is from: The Longest Crawl (Paperback)
Booze may have given us the rolling English road - it's also given us this rollicking good read. Once again Ian Marchant sets off on adventures picaresque around the British Isles; his last book was guided by the railway network, this is driven only by the shortest journey from pub to pub and is consequently a less structured odyssey (but none the worse for that). What's becoming his trademark mix of learned erudition (mostly on alcohol related matters) and the utterly personal makes this another highly compelling, entertaining and - though I sense he'd hate anyone who said it - improving yarn. Should be hung in every pub toilet. The book, that is...
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One For The Road,
By
This review is from: The Longest Crawl (Paperback)
The Humorous Travel Book, a genre fathered by Bill Bryson et al, has grown into something of a monster. Straightforward travel books, it appears, no longer sell like they used to; a dash of humour or a funny twist - pulling a dishwasher around the Hebrides, say - will open up whole new galaxies of readers.
And so I approached The Longest Crawl with trepidation. Would it perform to stereotype with quaint country taverns lining up like suitors at a debutantes' ball to get their name, location and list of amenities in print? Happily, no. Instead it provided me with four hundred or so pages of brilliantly observed detail, painstakingly researched history and geography, a cast of characters for whom the term 'colourful' was invented and a knowledgable and endlessly interesting narrative which held my attention right to the final paragraph. And yes - there was humour, lots of it. Mr Marchant appears to have approached his trek with the sole intention to inform rather than necessarily impress. Hence we have the no-holds-barred descriptions of a Sunday night in Great Driffield, a heroic pub crawl around Leeds and a search of Glaswegian off licenses for Buckfast Abbey tonic wine ("Buckie") and its partakers. The resulting narratives are as eye opening as they are entertaining. Great swathes of the Kingdom were bypassed in Marchant's month long journey from the Scillies to the Shetlands (no Blackpool, Newcastle or Southwold) but it is still jaw droppingly impressive that the author drank his way from one tiny island to another without, seemingly, missing any of the detail on the way. We can only assume that he either used a dictaphone and the patience to translate its alcohol-induced contents afterwards or he possesses the sort of memory completely immune to the most severe of brain cell slaying benders. My hat goes off to Mr Marchant and we can only hope that his liver and his thirst for adventure have not now deserted him as The Longest Crawl 2 should, by now, be in the planning stages. And this time don't forget Southwold!
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Cheers Mr Marchant,
By John Fraser "John" (St Albans) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Longest Crawl (Paperback)
What a treat - a month-long pub-crawl from the most southerly to the most northerly pub in the British Isles accompanied by the kind of chap you'd be happy to bump into at the end of any bar. Marchant's book is essentially a kind of love-letter to the joys of the English pub. And a funny one at that, with some truly laugh-out-loud moments. He has a great turn-of-phrase and can segue readily betweem moments of extreme humour and more explanitory passages about the process of brewing, say, without loosing the reader's interest.
A must for anyone who's ever enjoyed a shandy or two in their local.
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