Peter Ackroyd's London

[Richard Romeo]

Hi all--this review in the current NY Rev of Books is quite 
interesting--Fenton appears not to like this biography of London much, but 
the book appears to have a sensibility much aligned with that of M&D's 
London and spirit.
I beleive I read somewhere that Ackroyd wasn't very keen on Pynchon's work, 
but I may be thinking of the critic Peter Gay ( I always seem to mix those 
guys up)--rich

one partial review:  Though the variousness of London's chapters mean that 
it can be dipped into at random, Ackroyd is employing a skilful and 
continuous theme throughout, which constantly links past and present--the 
similarities of children's games in Lambeth in 1910 and 1999; the obsession 
with time--"in twenty-first century London time rushes forward and is 
everywhere apparent", while in 18th-century London the church clock of 
Newgate "regulated the times of hanging". Above all, he insists that the 
"dark secret life" of the metropolis is as relevant today as it was in 
perhaps its most appropriate period, Victorian London. Again and again 
Ackroyd returns to the image of London as a living organism, hence his use 
of the word "biography" in the title. At once awed by and intimate with this 
"ubiquitous" city, he stresses that "it can be located nowhere in particular 
... its circumference is everywhere".

The New York Review of Books
January 17, 2002

Review
Ghost Town
By James Fenton
London: The Biography
by Peter Ackroyd
Nan. A. Talese/Doubleday, 801 pp., $45.00


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