The trouble with the English is their weather

The trouble with the English is their weather is an expression that shifts from Sisodia’s knowing social complaint into Gibreel Farishta’s grand theory of English character. At first it is one of several exaggerated claims Sisodia enjoys airing; later, Gibreel makes the weather itself responsible for what he sees as the English inability to distinguish moral opposites. His diagnosis becomes a proposal to remake London as a tropical city, giving the phrase a strange double force: it is both a joke about national temperament and the premise of an imagined transformation.

Sisodia’s running complaint

Sisodia’s comments emerge during his regular visits to Gibreel at Maudsley Hospital. By the time doctors recommend a substantial reduction in Gibreel’s medication, Sisodia has become a familiar, eccentric presence at his bedside, entertaining him with anecdotes and opinions. Alleluia Cone is often occupied with promotional work, fitness training, and other commitments; she leaves Sisodia talking with Gibreel and finds him still in full flow when she returns. Among the themes she comes to recognize in his conversation is his collection of complaints about the English.

Sisodia’s version is social satire rather than a carefully reasoned account. He attributes English reserve to a history that happened overseas, argues that English people behave better when outnumbered at dinner parties, and points to the country’s fascination with gruesome entertainments as evidence against its self-image of restraint. His caricature piles together history, manners, popular culture, and national self-presentation. The weather phrase crystallizes this larger habit of explaining a people through a sharp, memorable generalization.

The performance is also self-aware. Gibreel appears to assent to Sisodia’s prejudices, which irritates Alleluia: she wonders whether those generalizations are all the men can see in England. Sisodia acknowledges that they are not, but admits that expressing them feels good. That admission makes the complaint more than a claim about the English. It also reveals its immediate social function: a release of irritation, delivered as entertaining talk rather than offered as a complete description of a country.

From complaint to explanation

After Gibreel’s second disappearance, a rumor circulates among London’s Asian population that he has levitated from the Earls Court stage. Accounts of a halo seen behind his head help fuel the story, and toy haloes and rubber horns appear in street markets. The narrative then presents Gibreel hovering over London and looking down at the city. In this visionary sequence, the earlier complaint returns in a more absolute form: the English are cold, their days resemble nights, and their life seems to take place underwater for much of the year.

The change in scale is decisive. Sisodia’s refrain had belonged to a stream of comic observations; Gibreel now treats weather as a cause. He reasons that when day is no warmer than night, light no brighter than dark, and land no drier than sea, people lose the ability to make distinctions. In his account, this atmospheric sameness produces moral and political uncertainty: parties, partners, and religious beliefs become interchangeable, while truth requires sharp boundaries and commitment. The expression thus becomes the hinge between a stereotype of English weather and Gibreel’s much wider indictment of English moderation.

The proposed tropicalization

Gibreel answers the condition he has diagnosed by announcing that he will tropicalize London. He imagines climate as something that can remake civic life, not merely alter the city’s temperature. The promised effects range from moral definition and a national siesta to more vivid public behavior and livelier popular music. The proposal gathers cultural judgments, practical consequences, and extravagant images into one catalogue, as if a change in weather could reorganize the whole texture of daily life.

His imagined London has macaws, peacocks, and cockatoos in its trees, with coconut palms, tamarinds, and banyans below them; flowers become strikingly colored, and spider monkeys appear in oak trees. The climate would also create demand for air-conditioning units, ceiling fans, mosquito coils and sprays, while supporting a coir and copra industry. The list mixes environmental transformation with commerce, tourism, sport, and infrastructure. A tropical London would attract conferences, produce better cricketers, and displace the English emphasis on high work rate in football with greater attention to ball control.

The social promises are equally sweeping. Gibreel anticipates religious fervor, political ferment, renewed intellectual interest, and an end to British reserve. He imagines friends visiting without appointments, the closure of old people’s homes, and a stronger emphasis on extended family. Food would become spicier, water would be used alongside paper in English toilets, and people would run fully dressed through the first monsoon rains. The catalogue makes the weather phrase a program for remaking habits and institutions as well as landscape.

The phrase’s shifting significance

The expression’s force comes from its movement between voices and scales. In Sisodia’s conversation, weather belongs to a set of knowingly overstated explanations of English behavior, and his admission that the talk feels good leaves the complaint open to comic self-criticism. In Gibreel’s vision, the same generalizing impulse hardens into a theory: a climate of ambiguity supposedly creates a society unable to choose, and tropical heat is imagined as the remedy.

That development does not establish that London actually changes climate or adopts the customs Gibreel lists. The passage gives the tropicalization as his declaration and imagined plan, within the sequence of his apparent disappearance and visionary return above the city. The phrase therefore connects the book’s recurring concern with transformation to Gibreel’s unstable effort to distinguish and reshape the world around him. What begins as Sisodia’s weather joke becomes, in Gibreel’s hands, a sweeping fantasy of cultural and moral remaking.