Mr. Gill & the Language

The British critic A A. Gill loves the English language but detests the English people.
In this curmudgeonly but very droll volume, he has lavish praise for the glories of English — “the most successful language that hurdled teeth” with “more ways of saying more things than any other language,” a language “as new as the most recent refugee,” a “brilliant, invisible river that flows all round us, full of things that we’ve left unsaid,” something “deeper than you will ever manage to plumb and faster than you will ever patter.”
The English people, however, annoy Mr. Gill no end: this “ugly race,” in his words, afflicted by an “earthbound pedantic spirituality” and “puce-faced, finger-jabbing, spittle-flecked politics,” a people “impervious to fondness, sympathy or attraction” and susceptible to “a Pooterish yearning for a Fascist order.”
A Scotsman who has spent much of his life living as an exile in what he sees as a hostile land, Mr. Gill says the opinions in this volume are “what I know to be true,” though the reader often suspects that he is writing tongue firmly in cheek. In fact, the central thesis of his book — that anger is the defining characteristic of the English people — feels more like a contrarian conceit than an earnestly held belief. Mr. Gill never says what the English might be so angry about, never comes up with any good examples of their fury, never explains why the country’s “default setting is anger: lapel-poking, Chinese-burning, ram-raiding, street-shouting, sniping, spitting, shoving, vengeful, inventive rage.”
Instead, he describes all the more familiar English traits — from a stiff upper lip to stoical humility, from good manners to a good sense of humor — as ingenious strategies for diffusing or deflecting anger. “Not giving in to your nature is very English,” he writes, “clinging on, white-knuckled, bottling the urges, refusing to slide into spittle-flecked release of snarling national fury.”