Rats cannot be sick, says Bill Bryson. Not many people know that. Rats can have sex 20 times a day. Further down the same page, we read that they also sleep 20 hours a day. Do the sums. Rats must fornicate five times an hour in their waking period, as well as eating rubbish and not being sick.
The phenomenally successful Bill Bryson is an American with an affection for this country, as is evidenced by his most famous book, Notes from a Small Island. He is president of the Society for the Preservation of Rural England and Chancellor of Durham University. He is also the huge, affable, best-selling presence at the popular end of a cultural and social history spectrum whose academic high end is represented by authors like Theodore Zeldin and Marina Warner. The method is to amass a dazzling number of facts and findings from disparate sources to create a mosaic that adds up to something or nothing, but is nearly always riveting.
Bryson does not do much original research. His new book, At Home, includes a 29-page bibliography listing both pot- boiling and scholarly works, all plundered to create his personal pick’n’mix with added insights and asides, simple but to the point — as when, in a section on the almost universal employment of servants, he remarks that ‘households had servants the way modern people have appliances’. They were necessities, for getting anything done. ‘Sometimes servants had servants.’
At Home is loosely structured round the uses of the different rooms — ‘The Kitchen’, ‘The Drawing Room’, ‘The Hall’ and so on — in the Norfolk rectory where he lives. His idea was to write ‘a history of the world without leaving home’. The rectory was originally built for the Rev Thomas Marsham, a bachelor of whom little is known except that his housekeeper of 40 years was a Miss Worm.
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