Weidenfeld £18.99 pp288

There has been a terrible mistake. The AA Gill that we thought we knew from his journalism and television appearances, a suave and well-spoken chap with an impish smile and satanic wit — the perfect Englishman, in fact — claims to be nothing of the sort. He is a Scot, and has a Scottish grandmother to prove it. He is not so much Adrian Anthony as Angry Angus Gill.

Being mistaken for an Englishman, Gill says, has always been a profound embarrassment. He finds us collectively “lumpen and louty, coarse, unsubtle, beefy-bummed”. Now, with a queasy distaste and some rather good jokes, he takes a tour d’horizon of English life, concluding that even the things we thought we did well — our history, our humour, our love of gardening, our class system — don’t exist or have been over-rated by the English habit of self-mythologising.

The dominant English talent, according to Angry Angus, is for establishing rules, conventions, etiquette, and that is because, as a nation, we are in a state of permanent repressed fury. Remove the regulations we have imposed upon ourselves and we would simply go berserk with an axe.

As readers of this newspaper will know, Gill is a delightful, funny polemicist. His prose floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee and, just when you least expect it, lands a deft and lethal blow beneath the belt.

Yet it is the moments in the book when he forgets he is supposed to be going for a knock-out blow and writes simply, clearly and from the heart that are most memorable. There is a superb chapter on war memorials, a fascinating mini-confession around his past alcoholism, an intelligent defence of political correctness and a startlingly good and funny description of the M40. But then, just as one is warming to the writing, Angry Angus stomps back in his Gucci hobnail boots.

If, as Gill argues, anger is the default setting of the English, that of its most successful media commentators is grumpiness. In today’s Grumpy-Old-Man culture, the trick is to locate an easy and familiar target — queues, say, or nostalgia, the suburbs or football — and shoot from the hip.

The approach works well in a column or on television, but a book is different. You can close a book and ponder, cross-check something in the index. You can wonder how a work on English rage can be written without reference to novelists such as Amis, father and son, or playwrights such as John Osborne, Harold Pinter or Sarah Kane — there are fewer references to the whole of English literature in the index than to Stow-on-the-Wold. It begins to seem distinctly odd that a chapter on English humour can be written entirely ignoring TV sitcoms.

Sometimes the various lines of attack become crossed. When, defending political correctness against the rage of the English, Gill argues that the PC approach is a matter of etiquette, of sensibly creating rules for the smooth running of society, he seems to have forgotten that his whole case against the English is that they are obsessed with precisely those things.

Opinions are always interesting, Gill believes rather surprisingly, but those of “the average Englishman”, invariably quoted before being attacked, are always dull and second-hand, while those of foreigners are obligingly rude about this country and its inhabitants. If these really are the views of those around him, one fears he must run with a rather dismal crowd.

The Angry Island is a swinging, rollicking polemic that will raise the temperature of the nation a couple more degrees and launch a thousand dinner-party conversations, but the distracting scent of self-distaste hangs over many of its pages. It is not our accent, facial expression (“inquiring, confident and guarded, the way a bull at a gate might regard you”), or facility for humour that distress him, but his own.

In the end, Gill’s version of the English provoked in this reader not anger, but sympathy. When he goes for a walk near Chipping Norton, he sees it, mystifyingly, as a barren landscape with no birdsong. Taking his son to a football game, he writes, “I try to be an ironic observer, aware that this is a touchstone ritual of father-and-

son dom; but secretly, I’m also afraid of football. It’s like standing on the edge of a precipice. I can feel its pull, sense its power.”

This scene, the ironic observer sitting with a rictus of superiority on his face, terrified of slipping into enjoyment — a perfect reflection of Gill’s version of an Englishman, incidentally — is also heartbreakingly sad.

Writing to make people laugh is easy, he claims, but it is anger that is easy, in writing as in life. Pleasure and celebration are tougher and he could do them brilliantly. But first he needs to lose that kilt, and rejoin the cheerful, pleasure-loving English.

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