Mr Finchley Discovers His England by Victor Canning

Set in the days of trilby hats and elm trees, Victor Canning’s Mr Finchley Discovers His England (1934) is a comic travelogue following the misadventures of balding administrator Edgar Finchley as he tramps across southwest England one summer.

It doesn’t start with hiking boots, however. Finchley’s plan is a seaside stop in Margate, but when he wakes to find himself in the back seat of a stolen Bentley roaring through country lanes with the police in pursuit, it’s not only his holiday which derails, but his entire philosophy.

“And as he smoked he came slowly to see … that danger, the wonder of the unexpected, the exhilaration of living and not knowing what one would be doing or where one would next be were the only thing that gave colour to life.” (903)

Finchley meets a parade of characters who reshape the way he interacts with threats, the unexpected, and danger. He chauffeurs a femme-fatale, dines with gypsies, pumps petrol, and assists smugglers. He is attracted to the self-sufficiency of John the artist and the passion of Captain Pitt tacking left of the law, but also to deeper relationships represented by the farm boys who help him evade capture and the romantic possibilities of Mrs Crantell; these bring him to a fuller philosophy.

“He no longer regretfully thought of London as he once had. He saw the two existences no more as contrasts, but as complements ...” (4025)

The narrative portrays an interwar England underpinned by politeness, and a countryside splendid with elm, cedar, hazels, and willow. There is constant birdsong and the narrator fluently identifies yellow wagtails, yellowhammers, goldfinches, wrens, and kestrels by sight and song. The reader is invited to enjoy the English countryside as much as Finchley does, though we are cautioned from romanticising country life by the wandering parson:

“I’ll wager … that you’ve probably had five or ten pounds in your pocket all the time, so that if you were too tired to sleep comfortably under a hedge, or it should rain hard, you could walk into a hotel! Do you call that roughing it? Do you think you can ever reach the real heart of these folks unless you approach them from their own plane? (1799)

The book’s introduction of successive characters becomes formulaic, but Canning’s brisk sentences give the tale alacrity and there’s much in his precise diction to amuse logophiles: pipe-dottle, tumbril, rean, charabanc, carillon, a briar brake…

I’d certainly travel with Edgar again, and lucky for me - there are two further books in this light-hearted series.

Many thanks to Farrago and NetGalley for this advanced reading copy.

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