How should we assess a collection of essays? Does the mere act of collecting disparate pieces of work by the same author within the confines of a single book mean we should hold them to a higher, or different, standard than the one we would apply if we picked up a yellowed copy of the magazine they originally appeared in? That’s the difficult question raised by James Meek’s Dreams of Leaving and Remaining, which collects some of the essays Meek wrote for the London Review of Books in the years before the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, albeit not in the order they were published. It is dotted with Meek’s present-day reflections.

Meek, a former foreign correspondent of some renown, is widely considered to be a master of expeditionary journalism: you know the type, when our fearless writer travels out into the country, interviews the locals and draws a series of conclusions, generally the ones they held at the start of their journey. Usually, but not always, the travelling journalist – think Chris Arnade’s journeys into Donald Trump’s America – returns from their journey recommending a greater measure of cruelty to people seeking to move to the country in question, and a modicum of increased compassion for the ones who already live here.

Happily, Meek’s prescriptions avoid cruelty and advocate for considerably more than a modicum of compassion. But that only adds to the challenge: do I find his work more congenial than the rest of the genre because it’s better, or because I agree with it? Do I enjoy reading his argument that taxation is “the form in which the Robin Hood myth crystallised into reality” because it is elegantly written, or because I nodded along with it? When he observes the contradiction of the liberal communitarian who wants to believe that the “good localism” of a “thriving local community, locally sourced food, preservation of vernacular local architecture” can be cleanly and perfectly separated from the acrid “bad localism” of hostility to immigrants and to all forms of change, do I enjoy it because it is wise, or because I recognise myself in the mirror Meek holds up?

Strangely enough, the book allowed me to answer that question better precisely because I found its central conceit irksome, but I loved reading – or rather, rereading the essays – anyway. The running theme of the essays Meek has chosen to include is that they are supposed to tell us something about our divided nation and where it should go from here.

But on that yardstick, the book is a failure. If the stated aim of the collection is to provide a portrait of the UK, why don’t these essays leave England? If this is about dreams of leaving, where is the dream of a second-generation Jamaican immigrant who voted leave in order to secure better visa rules? If these are the dreams of remaining, where is the account from one of the UK’s great cities, which largely voted to stay in? Far from the blurb’s promised “masterly portrait of a troubled nation”, this is a portrait of the English countryside (with a jaunt to Poland thrown in).

But it cannot possibly be right to say that this book is a failure when the account of the places Meek visits and the people he meets is so rich and so moving. The best of the collected essays is Leaving Life and Remaining, which touches on so many things: our fragmented and financially strained National Health Service, what it means to be part of the deserving or undeserving poor, what it means to be old. His description of that “difficult stage of life”, when “one condition can’t be tackled without taking into account a whole lot of others” will stay with me a long time.

How can a book that illuminates so much about the condition of our public realm, about the challenges facing farmers, about the condition of fishing towns, be a failure? If I would love this book were it called The Brexit Essays, can I say it is a disappointment because it is called Dreams of Remaining and Leaving?

Assessing Kevin O’Rourke’s A Short History of Brexit presents no such challenges: this is a book that, happily, throws up no surprises, at least in its form: it is short, it is history, and it is, you guessed it, about Brexit. It is a history with a curious history itself. It was originally written by O’Rourke, an Irishman teaching at a British university to explain to a French audience what the hell the UK had done and what it was up to now, then translated into English by him. The joy of a good history book is that it changes how you view the present, whether simply from the flash of recognition at the name of a street, or a greater appreciation of current events.

Anyone who has found themselves newly politicised by the convulsions of British politics in general or Brexit in particular will find this a handy primer on the events and undercurrents that led to our present discontent. Anyone who is familiar with that history will find something they knew, but hadn’t fully appreciated, whether that be Margaret Thatcher’s Germanophobia (she announced at a meeting of the European Council, after the reunification of Germany, “we beat the Germans twice and now they’re back”) or the extent to which the relative calm, even of Brexit Britain’s relationship with those nations it went to war with as recently as 1945, is an astonishing achievement compared with the fraught relations between combatants in the second world war across the rest of the globe.

It’s easier to say with certainty that A Short History of Brexit is a success because it provides exactly that. Dreams of Leaving and Remaining is a trickier beast: a beautiful collection by a renowned essayist whose title promises something that the work doesn’t deliver. If you pick it up because it has the name James Meek on the title, or you enjoy a well-written essay, you’ll love it. If you want a state-of-the-nation account, stick to O’Rourke.

Stephen Bush is political editor of the New Statesman.

• Dreams of Leaving and Remaining by James Meek is published by Verso (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

• A Short History of Brexit by Kevin O’Rourke is published by Pelican (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99