It doesn’t happen that often, but every now and then I read a description of London that makes me sit up – finally somebody sees London in the same way that I do! The following is from Penelope Lively’s very pleasant 1984 novel According To Mark – and is a perfect study of the overlapping Londons that exist inside my brain, and perhaps some of the other readers of this very occasional (sorry!) but still just about hanging on blog.
“To drive from south-west to north-east London is not just to spend a lot of time sitting in traffic-jams but also, for a certain kind of person, to pass through a system of references and allusions that ought to be more dizzying than it actually is. Mark, during the next hour and a quarter, found himself reflecting – in quick succession – upon Roman Britain, Whistler, Daniel Defoe, Harrison Ainsworth, Virginia Woolf, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and various other matters, all of these prompted by fleeting glimpses of the slivery glitter of the river, the dome of St Paul, a railway station or street name.
The city, indeed, seemed to exist not just on an obvious, physical and visual plane but in a secondary and more mysterious way as a card-index system to an inexhaustible set of topics… And all these references coexist in a landscape even though separated from one another by decades and centuries; the mind has no problem latching onto each one in turn, switching obediently from one level to another, providing without effort the appropriate furnishings by way of costume, language and action.
The head should be spinning, and yet it isn’t; it accepts quite calmly the promptings of what is seen and what is known.”
More soon, perhaps.
The Great Wen 