Well here we go. This was the book that made me laugh out loud on the train, and subjected me to the hard and withering glances of my fellow travellers. And now it’s finished.

Up until about half way through there was not a shred of doubt in my mind that if I was grading it, like a review at work, I’d be giving it a full five out of five. But now I’m not so sure.

True, there are some fantastic bits of writing in this autobiography, and in places it is Bryson at his best. He has always excelled in making fun of the everyday, mundane things that happen in life. Nowhere is this more true than in Thunderbolt Kid, where he describes his father’s wonderfully understated reaction to discovering he may be eating a peach from a jar that Bryson used as an emergency toilet whenever he was caught short.

Yet that, and the painful, hilarious description of a poorly-judged dive that has a three page lead up, and keeps our swimmer hanging in the air for a further two, cannot make up for the one thing this book lacks: three dimensional characters.

Everyone is plain, and simple, and totally lacking any depth. The geek has a bedroom full of Bunsen burners and chemicals and spends his weekends making gunpowder. The gay friend passes his whole time gushing about neighbours’ choice of nets and curtains. The thugs are nasty and have no redeeming features. And the only direct quote from any black character is ‘goddam fool muthah-fuckah’, as though copied straight from of the A-Team.

It leaves you feeling that in anonymising these people to save them from embarrassment and himself from litigation Bryson has removed all but their least subtle, most crass attributes, and for this you really don’t care about them a whole lot. That’s a problem when they’re almost as big a part of the story as he is himself.

Hand in hand with this is a stream of woeful exaggeration. Bryson has in places cast aside subtlety altogether and instead opted for the most crass exaggeration. I wasn’t there to witness first-hand any of the events he describes, so there is always the possibility they happened exactly as he says. But I find it hard to believe that he really did live such an exciting and colourful childhood, where school friends would knock up bombs in their bedrooms or knock off whole warehouses by stealing their entire stock of beer through a knocked-down back door.

Could this be explained by a sentence in the very second paragraph: ‘what follows isn’t terribly eventful’? Was he forced to make it moreso, by pushing his tales to the extreme?

For me the strength of this book - as with all of Bryson’s work - is in the way he digs up and then brings to life the smallest, most fascinating facts that you would otherwise never have known. The chapter Boom!, about the 1950s / 60s arms races is a case in point, and one that, alone, makes this book a worthwhile library lend. Whether it would make it worthy of purchase, I’m not so sure.

Certainly one for the Bryson completist, who won’t want a gap in their collection, and a good easy read for the commute, particularly as so many shops in London are currently selling it at half price, but not the highlight of Bryson’s career when taken as a whole.

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