SOCIETY: A Field Guide to the BritishBy Sarah Lyall Quercus, 277pp. £14.99 - THE WITTIEST THING about this book is its title and it is not accurate. A field guide is something that clearly identifies and defines the shape, sound and camouflage of the species you are observing and its identifiable characteristics, habitat and general behaviour.
It should be designed to help users distinguish animals and plants that may be similar in appearance but are not necessarily closely related. This guide notes little or nothing of the gnarled folk of Scotland, the genus of Northern Irish Unionists (a low-level taxonomic rank, used in the classification of living and fossil organisms) or the phylum (a biological taxon between kingdom and class) of the Welsh, but I suppose we must be grateful for small mercies. Nor do many Asian or black or Chinese British denizens flit into the ken of this twitcher.
Nonetheless A Field Guide to the British is a good read; Sarah Lyall is a somewhat urban guide, breathless at times and over-excited and apt to be loving but she laces her commentary with acerbic observations and anecdotes about the speckled and plain people of England.
Formerly a journalist on the New York Times she married an Englishman with a grand literary/bohemian background (Robert McCrum, former literary editor of the Observer) and observes with a beady, selective eye from a ringside seat; but the ring she mostly peers into is upper and upper-middle class England, a place apart from the shires and the black country where presumably more boring types - what bird watchers disparagingly call LBJs ( Little Brown Jobs ) live.
She pursues other specimens on the wing - most memorably to Prague - to observe the boorish behaviour of the brutish - sorry, read British - male there on a stag night, though no-one who has been to Temple Bar of an evening will need to have that spelled out.
She is funny about drink and the English and has plenty of good material to work on. The late George Brown, the Labour politician, (who happened on me in a corridor in the House of Lords, no really, and pulled all my hair down to prevent himself falling, not for me but flat on his face), in his cups once lurched up to a guest wearing a purple frock at the Peruvian embassy and asked for a dance. The guest refused: "First, you are drunk, second this is not a waltz but the Peruvian national anthem and third I am not a woman, I am the Cardinal Archbishop of Lima".
Sarah Lyall's Britain is a place peopled by men with gruff, self-deprecating manners and false modesty, where boarding school was the norm; a strange upbringing that tempered its victims into a native mould. She also seems to think her arrival in England in 1994 coincided with a profound change in society, an Anglo-Saxon version of the Celtic Tiger, but the huge changes in England started decades before, around 1964, when I arrived - only coincidence I think - and have been evolving ever since. But perhaps all we foreigners think a country only kick-starts when we arrive, much as children think history is a vacuum before they were born.
She stalks parliament, hedgehogs, cricketers, eccentrics, chavs and earls, and gets the Prince of Wales (PoW) in her sights. Of course.
He is the most recognised alpha big bird specimen of all, beautifully groomed by his underlings, lives in a rarefied habitat, but - to my mind - is without the innate, profoundly courteous manners which do truly distinguish certain Englishmen and which on the whole Irishmen know little about since they confuse charm with manners and often get away with it. (Although these same Englishmen can employ an icy courtesy to devastating effect).
I observed the PoW as host at a concert given by a most distinguished sitar player in St James's Palace. Fair play to the prince, who else in that appalling philistine family would have had such an esoteric and outlandish (literally) event in their drawing room?
He came in helping Kathleen Raine, the poet and Blake scholar who was 93 at the time, to walk; we were all seated quiet as mice on those spindly gilt chairs you get at fashion shows; in the middle of the front row stood a large, comfortable armchair - a small throne in effect - and guess what? HRH led the old dame to a gilt chair while he enthroned himself on the comfy one beside her. It was all I could do to stop myself leaning over to tap him on the shoulder and say "Oi! You! Move yer ass . . ."; but then I never have learnt to mind my own business.
Sarah Lyall is of the same ilk and views the fascinating question of class in Britain as slippery and bewildering. In fact it's not. Half of them are snobs and the other half don't care. Class is still important to the upper and middle classes. They can tell where you are in the social cut by the rake of your hair, your stance, dress and demeanour within 10 seconds, nay one second of meeting you.
Contrary to given opinion you don't need to open your mouth and say "pardon". After that initial recognition different standards are applied and there's no use trying. My mother-in-law, the granddaughter of an earl, naturally divided the world into two categories although only one category had a name: Gents. She liked the others (except of course the Irish, Jews and Johnny Foreigner), and worked and dealt with them amiably, but they might as well have been penguins as people.
To get a real bead on the English class consciousness leave Lyall and read Evelyn Waugh or James Lees-Milne or Nancy Mitford. Lees-Milne was by way of being a friend of mine, or perhaps the other way around, and he was always amiable and charming when I sat beside him at dinner or lunch at his house or mine. Yet I read in his odious, snobbish, riveting diaries about the strange flora and fauna of his own secret planet that the Irish are a stinking race and how he hates us; and in one of those same diaries I came across three ominous words: Polly, much improved. Which means I had sounded more English to him or had conformed to acceptability or maybe that day had transferred the coals from the bath to the cellar.
When I first came to England I thought the English were unfathomable; it took me years to realise my mistake; I was sending down plumb lines when I should have been stroking the surface. Sarah Lyall gets this - she doesn't miss much - but she (and this is what is amazing) finishes up apparently liking the race. I hate the f**kers though I married one. Soon enough after we were married I raised a glass of champagne to my new husband and said cheers. And he said, in a mild voice, if you ever say cheers to me again I shall divorce you. All the same, it's the only time he has ever evidenced any prejudice about anything.
No I tell a lie: I remember he once had to carry a brown paper parcel and his agony was awful to witness. He only wore his old school tie when travelling and after a while I sussed out that behind those impeccable mild manners there was a rigorous system of signals and inhibitions metronoming on, a system read and understood by a wider range of people than I had dreamed of.
The truth is that some of the English are very hard to like: inarticulate, hard-hearted, snobbish, angry, pleased with themselves, anti-Semitic, often aggressive, deeply stupid and make no mistake, on the whole hating and despising the Irish, who can run rings round them in term of intellect and wit.
THE THING IS THAT WHAT has happened to the English is that nothing has happened to the English. Not since 1066 have they been invaded; the Blitz is treated as though it was apocalyptic when it was nothing to what they did to many other nations over the centuries systemically and sustainedly.
It would have been wonderful for Ireland and for England if Napoleon had won - we'd have had the metric system, a free Ireland, good food and civilized if nasty citizens. Sarah Lyall doesn't go in for any of this - she writes about what she sees and hears and doesn't speculate much except on, say, the question of British teeth - why are they so scary? And she makes you laugh.
Nicholas Soames, huge and rude and an MP, once showed up for parliament dressed in a tweed hunting suit. "Going ratting Soames?" asked Tim Sainsbury, a fellow MP and member of the Sainsbury supermarket family.
"I say," Soames replied, "Fancy being lectured on your gear by your grocer."
Polly Devlin is a broadcaster and writer and currently an adjunct professor at, Columbia University. She has received an OBE for services to literature. Her book, A Year in the Life of an English Meadow, was published last year