ABSTRACT
Bill Bryson's bestselling travelogue The Lost Continent (1989) at one level recounts the author's bemused peregrinations around small-town America. At another level, however, it records a different sort of journey, more subtle and more inward. As Bryson re-enacts the dreadful vacation trips of his 1950s childhood, he slowly works through some of his complex, conflicted feelings towards his recently deceased father. Both journey and narrative begin with Bryson harbouring some resentment towards the tedium of his Iowa upbringing, and towards his father for inflicting that upbringing on him. Yet as the journey progresses, he comes to feel that Iowa in the 1950s was not such a bad place to be brought up, certainly in comparison with many regions of the United States in the late 1980s. In the process, Bryson gradually revises his opinion of his father and ceases to regard him as a failure for settling in, and settling for, Iowa. In fact, Bryson senior had many virtues, and many accomplishments to his name, as his son's narrative increasingly acknowledges. In this way The Lost Continent charts not only the literal travels of its author, but also an emotional and psychological journey within the author; or more precisely, an emotional and psychological evolution which is 97always likely, in our culture at least, to be construed metaphorically as a journey. And in the absence of any clear goal or destination for Bryson's actual travels, it is principally this inner development that gives shape and aesthetic form to his narrative. It generates for the reader a pleasing sense of closure and completion; we finish Bryson's travelogue feeling that this traveller has at least made some important self-discoveries, even if he has not made the great discoveries about the wider world that are perhaps more traditional in travel writing.
