London Visionary

London is timeless. It exists outside the dimensions of ordinary human time, with a secret life that can be measured in hundreds or thousands of years. Time in London resembles a lava flow from some unknown source of fire. Some parts of it move slowly, some parts of it move quickly, and some parts of it have ceased moving altogether. This is what Blake meant by Infinite London.

London is eternal. It is the place where the same life can be repeated endlessly…..

Oh dear, it can only be Peter Ackroyd.

There’s something, I don’t know, un-English about Ackroyd’s blatherings. You could imagine guff like this written about Paris (with Baudelaire instead of Blake)…”Paris is illimitable, like a river sourced at the very fount of human creativity, she exists above and yet within our imaginations, eternal, part of our dreams, yet as real as the sunshine that caresses Notre Dame every morning…. Paris is as old as the stones of the Boulevard St Michel, as young as the smile of a pretty girl on the Metro….” It’s the sort of rubbish you flick past at the start of a Parisian guide book while you’re trying to work out where the hell the exit is from Les Halles. But London?…no.

This latest piece of Ackroyd is inflicted on us as a puff for the forthcoming TV series based on his London: A Biography book, and frankly it doesn’t augur well. I’ll admit that I haven’t read his biographies of Dickens or Blake, and it’s clearly true that the man has a massive fund of knowledge – “London: A Biography” is readable and entertaining – but Ackroyd seems to me to be colossally self-indulgent. His best work, like Hawksmoor, owes more than a bit to Iain Sinclair, while his worst is getting on for unreadable. I couldn’t manage more than a few pages of The House of Doctor Dee, and Albion – the Origins of the English Imagination reads like he just got pissed every night, wrote down what came into his head, bundled it all up and sent it off to his publisher, who because of Ackroyd’s reputation didn’t change a thing. There’s something a bit too calculated about the way Ackroyd has set out to market himself as The London Visionary.