London Under

August 8, 2011
Ackroyd’s investigation into the heated depths lurking under London—the Victorian sewers, tube stations, underground springs, that terrain that is “home of the devil and of holy water”— fascinates in conception and falters in execution. The journalist and biographer relies too heavily on his theme of the underground as an underworld, hooking his scrupulous research into it as he digs down through London’s gault clay and chalk into the “portals” of “dark matter.” Ackroyd (London) offers a brisk geological, historical, and cultural survey of buried Roman roads, wells from the fourth century, canals filled with fetid gases, rivers with 48 skulls excavated, and “dead tunnels” of mole men; his take is whimsical, vibrant, and lurid, but occasionally lacking in sufficient direction and tension. Still, with characteristic obsession and stellar accompanying images, the book does home in on the breathing vitality of London’s underworld—“If you put your ear close to it, you can still hear the sound of the river pulsing underneath—and is a “votive offering to the gods who lie beneath London.”

August 15, 2011

The indefatigable expert on the Big Smoke considers the history below London's streets from a historical, mythical and psycho-geographical perspective.

Ackroyd (Venice: Pure City, 2010, etc.) has worn many literary hats over the years—historiographer, biographer and novelist, to name a few. After recent years of reliable and prolific just-the-facts history on everything above ground in London (including the River Thames), the author lowers himself into the muck of London's mysterious underworld in this compact but surprisingly diverse study. "Like the nerves within the human body, the underworld controls the life of the surface," writes the author. Alongside the usual straight-laced factual history, Ackroyd enhances his research with airy philosophizing, grandiose pronouncements and fashionable filth-mongering, all while teasing out the hidden meanings and subterranean lore of life under the capital. He contemplates underground rivers and streams, the London Underground transit system and the "tube," the elaborate network of sewers, tunnels, buried wells and springs, former bomb shelters, and, of course, the city's cemeteries and catacombs. He provides the back story on how London's geographical nomenclature is tied to its rich underground history, not to mention how this netherworld has become a source of terror and wonderment in the minds of surface-dwellers. Throughout, Ackroyd is at his most wildly associative and experimental. A good example of his approach throughout comes in the chapter "Far Under Ground," where he personifies individual tube lines: "The Circle Line is adventurous and breezy, while the Bakerloo Line is disconsolate and brooding." Readers who have experienced the same underside of London will find it difficult not to concede the accuracy of characterizations like these, however whimsical.

Eloquent and visceral.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

October 1, 2011
What enormous hosts of dead belong to one old great city! Dickens marveled in 1861. Ackroyd here invades the ghostly realm under Britain's greatest old city. Visits to crypts, catacombs, and cemeteries draw the reader deep into the hidden world where prehistoric mastodons, Roman soldiers, medieval monks, and Victorian burghers mingle in sepulchral gloom. But that gloom also pulses with the energy of life: the crowded underground railroads still running on routes carved out by intrepid nineteenth-century tunnelers, the black filth flowing through a thousand miles of sewer lines still performing the inglorious function of medieval cesspools, and the intricate modern matrix of conduits and pipes carrying electricity, natural gas, and drinking water. Nonhuman life also scurries through the shadows: cockroaches, rats, and even mysterious white crabs. But Ackroyd fuses dead and living, human and animal, technological and natural in the final chapter, where underground geography becomes imaginative metaphor in the Eloi-Morlock fantasy of Wells' Time Machine. As a sequel to London: The Biography, this is an enthralling step down!(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)