Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination by Peter Ackroyd
468 pages
Published 2002
Read from March 5 to April 26
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Albion's encyclopedic density recalls Ackroyd's London: The Biography, which I adored but just couldn't get through back in 2012. It is a rich but occasionally unfulfilling stew of anecdote, historical adumbration, and cameo, breezing through quite interesting asides but returning again and again to themes which grow tiresome not a hundred pages in. Albion is a sustained argument for a sort of national character or genius loci, born of place rather than race; not a chapter goes by without ticking through a rosary of Ackroyd's characterizations of the English taste or temper, which he relates nebulously (mostly by means of repetition) to Anglo-Saxon or occasionally Celtic originals. We learn that the English have a taste for surface ornamentation at the expense of internal grandeur, which Ackroyd relates to everything from Celtic knotwork to Perpindicular Gothic architecture to the English detective novel. We learn of the English "embarrassment" or reticence, seen in everything from the wry self-effacement of authors to the screened-in structure of the hidden English garden. We get told again and again of the English (or rather Londonish) taste for variety in emotional effects and spectacle, rather than lingering examination of any one mode of feeling. Ackroyd's disinclination (and presumed inability) to offer explanations for why such a stereotypical "placist" temper could persist over at least a millennium and a half leaves Albion a collection of moods and curiosities rich in superficial detail but lacking inner substance. Likely it's meant that way.
Another thing that Albion taught me is that I have read pathetically little of the classic English literary canon. I gotta start with Chaucer and Langland and work my way forward, one of these years.
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