Watling Street - Nov 2023 Book Group dicussion thread

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McGoohan
McGoohan
Nov 2023
10:44am, 2 Nov 2023
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McGoohan
As chosen by Columba, the November book is Watling Street by John Higgs.

The author travelled the length of this ancient road from Dover to Angelsey and still had time to *glances at notes* invent the Higgs Boson on his day off. (Remind me to check that later.)

Please carefully arrange your thoughts below much as you would a prize-winning flower arrangement.
Diogenes
Diogenes
Nov 2023
11:26pm, 3 Nov 2023
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Diogenes
For a book l liked so much I really ought to be able to say more about than what follows. From the start I was beguiled by Higgs erudition and engaging style. Then a couple of things he said lead me to doubt him: there was something in Kent and then a detail about the layout of Milton Keynes that made me think the author was stretching the truth a little too far to fit his narrative, but despite these qualms this is an interesting, educational and entertaining book that I thoroughly enjoyed reading. I only wish I could remember everything is learnt reading it. I have read more of his work since and will more still
Diogenes
Diogenes
Nov 2023
10:25am, 6 Nov 2023
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Diogenes
[I was a bit tired when I wrote the above, but I think you get the gist]
Ocelot Spleens
Ocelot Spleens
Nov 2023
10:37am, 6 Nov 2023
38,119 posts
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Ocelot Spleens
Could be right up my, er, street, like A303!
Chrisull
Chrisull
Nov 2023
11:24am, 7 Nov 2023
20,832 posts
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Chrisull
I'm a critical "fan" of Higgs. I've read 4 and a half books of Higgs now, of which the KLF one was undoubtedly the best, and sent me off on a reading voyage ( on many of the characters and topics - the next I read was Erik Davis's "High Weirdness in the 1970s" was the one which goes into way more detail about Robert Anton Wilson and his made up religion). So then I followed it with "a short history of the 20th century" which was also very good meeting various radical characters and making a good case for them, then Watling street, I started the Future starts here (an optimistic guide to what comes next) and then "I have America surrounded (the life of Timothy Leary).

Watling Street - is the one where I started having some doubts occasionally as others have, as I know a fair bit on roman roads, and some of the things weren't entirely correct. But not enough to put me off.

But the Future starts here, definitely exacerbated the issues. Again, when he talked about AI, and it was a very superficial kind of treatment that someone who'd read 3 of 4 articles about the subject and then summed them up without too much extra thought and he wasn't bringing anything new to the party either, and aspects felt phoned in. At his best he's like Adam Curtis on steroids, at his worst he's a naughty boy who hasn't done his homework and scribbled it down on some scrap paper found on the bus and finished it at 5 to 9 to have something to hand in.

What I'd liked about the KLF book was it was a very deep dive into some aspects of what Bill Drummond had done, bits that aren't that well recounted, and in the 20th century book there was a great chapter on meeting Alan Moore. The Timothy Leary one again benefits from the research, but I do find myself wondering on several occasions how deep has the research that's been done after all?? Is Higgs taking a superficial reading of some interesting and complex themes and providing a dumbed down - but entertaining riff on them?

So Watling street was definitely a 7/10 kind of book, some of the historical bits were definitely over simplified, but it was pulled together by the travelogue. I'm conflicted!
Columba
Columba
Nov 2023
9:37pm, 16 Nov 2023
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Columba
Watling Street...
I shan't re-read, and shan't keep it. That being said, I enjoyed some of it. Some bits which I didn't know about were interesting. Some bits were interesting because I did know something about them, e.g. the Bletchley Park bit because my father was there from about 1941 to '45, not that he fitted John Higgs's specification (p 208-9) of "someone recruited for their social status and connections, rather than for their skill as a code-breaker".
I felt the author was mainly being self-indulgent, chatting away about what he felt like chatting about, rather than giving us some Solid History. He doesn't always get his facts right. e.g. p 43, "As the Old Testament states, 'In the beginning was the Word'." No it doesn't; that particular quotation is from John's Gospel in the New Testament.

I got very bored with the Alan Moore section.

Let's see what anyone else thought.
Columba
Columba
Nov 2023
9:44pm, 16 Nov 2023
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Columba
Diogenes and Chrisull: you have both confirmed what I suspected, that the author makes mistakes. Having recognised one or two, in areas I happened to know about, I thought there would probably be others in areas which I didn't know about.
McGoohan
McGoohan
Nov 2023
10:54am, 21 Nov 2023
53,357 posts
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McGoohan
Watling Street ought to be right up my, ahem, street. It does after all trace an ancient route in Britain - and I do that. I do that A Lot. John Higgs does also mention Bill Naughton’s story ‘Late Night on Watling Street’ and that was, way back when, one of the stories we studied in the collection ‘Short Stories of Our Time’ for our GCE O Level English Literature. I had always wondered about it. So, he had a pre-warmed-up and pre-invested reader in me.

Initially, Higgs got my back up a bit. It soon became clear he wasn’t really tracing Watling Street and he hadn’t done it in order. If you look at the dates, you see he went hither and thither and yon up and down the rough vicinity of Watling Street and visited some parts further along the way before he’d even left the Kentish bits. I was also irritated by the differing and (as yet) unexplained different versions of how Ian Fleming chose the code ‘007’.

My main complaint though was that for a book about an ancient way, there is no sense of travel. There are lots of famous ones. Laurie Lee’s As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning or Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Between The Woods and the Water are the obvious ones, but more recently Guy Stagg’s The Crossway about his journey to Rome and Jerusalem. These describe long, spiritual, possibly metaphysical journeys. I don’t think it’s too demanding of me to expect a book about an ancient road to have some sense of the journey along that road is it?

I was wrong. The fault was in me.

John Higgs is not really a travel writer and though it was shelved under Travel Writing in the library, it isn’t. He’s a Cultural Historian and the book is misfiled. His Watling Street isn’t so much the path, but the line that divides two things. Originally the Danelaw and the Saxons, but as the book came out just after the Brexit vote, it’s now about a different set of divisions. ‘Watling Street’ is much more of a framework on which Higgs can look at different aspects of what makes Englishness (or indeed Britishness), the things that divide us and the things that bring us together.

Just as I was getting irritated by the third iteration of the 007 origin, Higgs came clean and revealed it was his device for showing both the unreliability of evidence and how history is selective. Looking back over it, rather than a travelogue, each chapter is more of a thought-experiment. He repeatedly questions history and myth and treats the two things, playfully enough, as essentially the same.

I’ve given it an 8.
Diogenes
Diogenes
Nov 2023
10:57am, 21 Nov 2023
82,772 posts
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Diogenes
Very good summary. I enjoyed it for what it was, particularly the thought experiment elements.
McGoohan
McGoohan
Nov 2023
10:59am, 21 Nov 2023
53,358 posts
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McGoohan
Having read back others' comments now - yes, there are mistakes (e.g. a ha-ha isn't named for poshos laughing at people falling in. It's from the surprise of finding a ditch ahead of you) but I found them sufficiently few to ignore.

This is nothing like the A303 book which *is* much more of a travelogue and I think a weaker book. There's not much of a thesis in A303 and while it starts well, it sort of tails off in effectiveness close to the end (much like the actual A303).

About This Thread

Maintained by McGoohan
As chosen by Columba, the November book is Watling Street by John Higgs.

The author travelled the length of this ancient road from Dover to Angelsey and still had time to *glances at notes* invent the Higgs Boson on his day off. (Remind me to check that later.)

Please carefully arrange your thoughts below much as you would a prize-winning flower arrangement.

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