Dodger

By John Skow

THE KINGDOM BY THE SEA by Paul Theroux

Houghton Mifflin; 353 pages; $16.95

Modestly ironic accounts of crocodiles evaded, sheep's-ear soup survived, and thieving camel drivers overcome are what a proper travel book requires. The author labors at gaudy landscapes because they make good backdrops for sketches of himself in jaunty poses; the reader tolerates this hamminess because tales of bandits and dysentery make him feel snug in his armchair. Writing such stuff is an honest dodge, and in recent years no one has dodged more expertly than Paul Theroux in The Great Railway Bazaar (Europe and Asia) and The Old Patagonian Express (North and South America).

An unspoken compact between author and reader, however, assumes that the author should more or less enjoy his journeying. Not everything about it, not the fleas and the sandstorms. In general, though, a good travel writer should like what he sees and, in the manner of a Labrador retriever who wanders, admire each new vista slightly more than the last. If not, why travel? What's the point?

Theroux violates the unspoken rule in his third travel book, subtitled A Journey Around Great Britain. Here he loathes almost everything he sees and despises each new horror more than the one before. Since there is no reason to believe that he is wholly wrong in his judgments, he convinces the reader that to visit this wretched shore would be an act of lunacy.

Theroux had lived for eleven years in London, he writes ("I had come to dislike the city"), but knew little about the rest of England. He decided to travel around its coast and those of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, going mainly by foot and rail, as is his custom, and avoiding cathedrals and castles on principle. The prem ise sounds delightful; the practice was catastrophic. Man was so vile that few prospects pleased. The author found defeated respectability at best, tackiness and decay as a matter of course, buildings meanly and cheaply made, people ignorant and dulled.

Hypnotized by ugliness, he writes:

"Walking south from Littlestone was drearier in sunshine than it would have been in fog or rain, because the bright light exposed every woeful bungalow ..." "Most villages and towns wore a pout of rejection." "None of this made the town of Portsmouth visibly interesting, because nothing could." "I saw that Dawlish was small and dull." "Every house was identical, and equally ugly." "I saw British people lying stiffly on the beach like dead in sects." "I came to hate Aberdeen more than any other place I saw." "Up close, Deny was frightful." "I decided that I had seen few places on earth more depressing than Strobane in the rain." "If I had only one word to describe the expression of Eng land's face I would have said: insulted."

Theroux cheers up briefly in Wales, possibly because the Welsh language, which he does not understand, makes what is dreary seem exotic. (No doubt travel writers should stick to countries whose languages elude them: bad German, for instance, is an asset in Zurich; you can have a comical adventure asking for a train ticket to Senf, which means mustard, instead of Genf, which is Geneva.) Following the coast turned out to be a mistake, because its towns were filled with a seedier lot of tourists than Theroux would have met in castles and cathedrals.

He grumbles about the nuclear power plants he passes, and is horrified at the despair of jobless young people, but the nec essary briskness of a travel book prevents him from saying anything compelling on these subjects. At times he seems to be seeking out ennui at its most numbing, as if to raise torment to a mystical level.

Theroux comments that travel is of ten like moving about in time. "Most countries had specific years," he writes.

"In Turkey it was always 1952, in Malay sia 1937, Afghanistan was 1910, and Bo livia 1949. It is 20 years ago in the Soviet Union, ten in Norway, five in France. It is always last year in Australia and next week in Japan. Britain and the United States were the present -- but the present contains the future." During his trip, he writes, understating the case, he was "not necessarily looking for progress"; deterioration and decay seemed to him more futuristic. Possibly, though, in sneering endlessly at elderly tourists too poor to visit Majorca, and at the purse-mouthed landladies who served them their tea, he does not prove a case or even state one clearly.

What this usually admirable writer establishes in the end is that not all journeys should be written about.

-- By John Skow This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.