2013 read #47: Foundation by Peter Ackroyd.

Foundation: The History of England from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Tudors by Peter Ackroyd
447 pages
Published 2011
Read from April 11 to April 17
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Peter Ackroyd is my favorite author whose books I never finish. This is the first Ackroyd book I managed to read in full, after getting about a third of the way each through London: The Biography and The Life of Thomas More, and a page or two into Venice: Pure City. I love Ackroyd's discursive style, his roving eye for trivia and sharp anecdote, but his rambling, info-dense manuscripts are meant for ownership, not rental, best appreciated a chapter at a time over a period of weeks or months rather than read straight through on a deadline. This book is new to my library's collections, so that deadline was particularly close; the library only lets out new titles for two weeks at a time. Luckily, Foundation was considerably less digressive and dense than the other Ackroyd works I've encountered. His narration was positively breezy at times, especially in the early going. As with most other histories of this scope, Foundation's main failing was how quickly it burned through what I would consider the truly interesting material. The first 898,000 years of hominid history in Britain are dispensed with in twenty-four pages, and the entirety of the Roman period is allotted a pitiful sixteen pages. That was the stuff I most wanted to read, damn it, the sort of thing foundation conjures in my mind. I was hoping we'd get at least a hundred pages of pre-medieval material; I've read plenty of medieval histories, after all, and felt drawn to this book by the promise of something different. Instead we're forging ahead to William the Conqueror, about five hundred years deep into the middle ages, by page 86. History gets less and less interesting the closer you get to the present. I don't know why I'm the only reader who seems to feel that way.

A deep time enthusiast's perennial disappointment with history books aside, Foundation was an excellent work, emphasizing the deep continuities of British history, which are always fascinating, even if Ackroyd might be overstating the case just a smidgeon. What's more, Ackroyd, as per his usual style, makes a point of incorporating the lives of common folk in his history, winnowing dozens of anecdotes from primary sources arresting in their intimacy and immediacy.

This book makes me want to tackle London: The Biography again, maybe once my backlog stack is a bit less overwhelming.