Thames: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd
441 pages
Published 2007
Read from February 23 to March 29
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
At some point I must have mentioned how Ackroyd's London: The Biography was my favorite book that I've never finished. I read about a third of that tome, dazzled and entranced by Ackroyd's signature non-fiction style, a mix of anecdote, legend, trivia, and delightful digression. The density of that style, however, gummed down my attention span; London, even more so than Ackroyd's other historical surveys, is meant for sampling, for after-dinner perusal, a chapter here or there, not so much for consecutive reading. Thames, unsurprisingly, is more of the same, directed by the flow of the titular river rather than the metropolis, but otherwise practically a continuation of the first volume. Along with Albion, London and Thames form a sort of conceptual trilogy or protracted thesis statement, adumbrating on Ackroyd's lifelong theme of genius loci, the connection between place and person, the recurrence of certain events or motifs in particular locations, a persistence of taste or temper or ritual from the Roman or Saxon ages down to the present.
Sometimes, the connections he traces can be a bit of a stretch. Seemingly every few paragraphs, Thames works in some variant on "Perhaps this is the ancient spirit of the river?" or "This might hold the key to much earlier phases of life beside the Thames." Most likely this would not seem so repetitive had I followed a more leisurely, à la carte reading schedule -- or perhaps it would, no matter what, considering that I deliberately took my time with this book, having learned my lesson from London. Some chapters caught my imagination more than others: the various categories of employment along the London riverfront and docks, for instance, were fascinating, certainly more so (to my taste) than the dry list of churches within the vicinity of the river's course. All in all, Thames was a lovely and absorbing read, even if it isn't as inspired a ramble as (what I managed to read of) London.
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