London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd
775 pages
Published 2000
Read from approximately January 15, 2021 to December 21, 2022
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
After reading so much during the month of October, my attention span got redirected to other hyperfocuses for a while. (I played Fable II start to finish for the first time since 2012 or so, and then followed it up with Fable III.) Books slipped through the cracks. Part of the problem was, nothing seemed to hold my interest. Books I'd have devoured in a day back in October I could only read a page or two at a time before giving up.
Fortuitously, "a page or two at a time" happens to be an excellent way to read London: The Biography.
I first tried to read this book back in 2013 or 2014. At one point I called it "My favorite book that I never finished." It consists of chapter after chapter -- some seventy-nine altogether -- each of them a rambly assemblage of anecdotes drawn from primary and secondary sources loosely grouped around a theme (e.g., alcohol, theater, sound, the crowd, Clerkenwell, the children of the city, the Underground, etc.). It's a fine book to have on hand and maybe read whatever random chapter appeals to you that day, but it's a bear to read cover to cover. I gave up maybe halfway through. I picked it up again last year while sort of casting about for anything to distract me in the wake of some traumatic life changes. Again, I only got about halfway in before setting it aside.
So last month, when I found myself in the mood to peck my way through a book that didn't require sustained attention, I turned once again to London. This time I resumed where I'd left off. I wouldn't remember much of the book, but I wouldn't need to.
Ackroyd spends the bulk of
London reiterating what, at this point in his writings, seems to have been his major theme: Certain places in England keep attracting the same sort of personalities, events, and vibes through the centuries. In essentially every chapter he provides a litany of mildly curious coincidences and historical parallels -- for example, the long history of revolutionary thought in Clerkenwell -- and is content to call it "the spirit of London" or attribute it to a given neighborhood's "genius loci." More rigorous sociological explanations receive little attention. The same motif animates Ackroyd's
Albion and
Thames: The Biography. That's a lot of words for such a slender thesis. Ackroyd's vision of egalitarian London also seems a bit optimistic twenty-two years and one Brexit later.
After considering London "my favorite book I never finished" for so long, closing the cover this final time felt anticlimactic. Perhaps that can be attributed to the general listlessness and anhedonia as we head into year four of a global pandemic and also continue to endure all the ills of modern capitalism.
Perhaps Ackroyd's chapter on the Blitz captured the current mood best: "The intended victims [of the V1 firebombings] became depersonalised.... The general mood was one of 'strain, weariness, fear and despondency.' 'Let me get out of this' was the unspoken wish visible upon every tired and anxious face, while at the same time the inhabitants of London carried on with their customary work and duties. The mechanism continued to operate, but now in a much more impersonal manner; the whole world had turned into a machine, either of destruction or of weary survival."