Second paragraph of third chapter:
At lunchtime we found a fantastic restaurant. From the outside it looked ordinary, a little run-down even, but once you went through the door you were in another world. There was Duke Ellington playing on the tape deck, and a smell of rich sauces reducing and cognac and cigars. A group of businessmen were sitting having dessert. Their puddings looked like they had been fashioned by Faberge.
Pearson is apparently a well-known UK sports journalist; he wrote this book about exploring Belgium with his girlfriend and their baby daughter in 1997 and 1998 (so the baby must now be almost 30). It’s a slightly frustrating book. There are some memorable turns of phrase and neat anecdotes such as this, from the museum in Tournai:
There was one eye-catching canvas, a massive Victorian oil painting called The Plague of Tournai in 1090 by someone named Galliat. The scene depicted was one of gruesome devastation, with people weeping and wailing and mad dogs tearing at the flesh of unburied bodies. I couldn’t help noticing in the centre of it all that several young women had reacted to the crisis by tearing open their bodices and baring their perfectly formed breasts. At first I thought this was simply gratuitous. Later, though, I wondered if Monsieur Galliat hadn’t based his work on historical records. After all, people did all sorts of weird stuff to prevent the plague – wore masks, burned incense; Arnold of the Abbey of Oudenburg near Bruges even insisted his parishioners drank beer instead of water, and became patron-saint of Belgian brewers as a result – perhaps this was just another of them.
I imagined a meeting of Tournai Town Council.
‘What will we do about this dreadful plague?’ the mayor asks.
‘Why don’t we get all the nubile women of the city to expose their bosoms?’ cries a councillor.
‘And will that stop the plague?’ asks the mayor.
‘Who cares!’ replies the councillor.
Alas, this is a little too good to be true. Close inspection of the actual painting reveals only one or two boobs, so it’s not exactly a major theme of the art.
Internally the book is very disorganised, jumping around in space and time somewhat jerkily within chapters. There’s a bit of “aren’t foreigners funny”, but there’s also a fair bit of defensiveness towards Belgium.
Maurice Maeterlinck, for example, is routinely described in English-language surveys of European writers as a ‘Belgian-born French dramatist’, despite the fact that he didn’t actually move to France until he was thirty-six. Nor was it such a surprise to hear the actor Gene Wilder telling Sue Lawley of his love of all things French on Desert Island Discs and then going on to pick a record by Jacques Brel to remind him of Paris.
In summary, I was a bit disappointed. The book has its moments, but needed to have them better connected to each other. You can get A Tall Man in a Low Land here. I see that Pearson has more recently written a book about Flemish bike racing, with the intriguing title The Beast, the Emperor and the Milkman.
This was both my top unread book acquired in 2021, and the non-fiction book which had lingered longest on my shelves. The next books on those piles respectively are Science(ish): The Peculiar Science Behind the Movies, by Rick Edwards, and Mother Ross: An Irish Amazon, by G.R. Lloyd.
