Customer Reviews

Thames: The Biography

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When I opened Ackroyd's biography of Sir Thomas More many years ago, and read the pages in which he imagines how his subject wended his way to school through late 15th century London and what he saw and encountered on his way, I was stunned by his uncanny ability to create, de facto, two characters: More and London itself. Happily for us all, he has gone on to write a series of three books that really do serve as "biographies of place", if such a phrase exists. The first was London: The Biography, the second, Albion: Origins of the English Imagination, a tour de force of what is distinctively English. The third in the series is this biography of the Thames River. However unlikely the subject, the book is easily the equal of anything else this eclectic and accomplished author has produced.
As anyone who has ever flown into Heathrow airport across the span of London has seen first hand, the river twists like a silver ribbon throughout the city of London, and leads onward to the sea and up into the heart of the country. Ackroyd's narrative is as sparkling as water should be and thankfully not as sludgy as that of the Thames in London itself too often still is, and takes nearly as many twists and turns in describing its subjects.
Ackroyd, for instance, delves into the symbolic meaning and physical construction of bridges across the Thames, from the earliest days, to the medieval London Bridge and on to the present. The Magna Carta -- the base document on which Anglo-American democracy was founded -- was signed in a meadow by the Thames some 800 years ago. Centuries later, the London docks helped establish London as the center of a commercial empire and were the departure point for generations of explorers, from Raleigh and Drake onwards. (Some of those vessels are still moored for visitors to explore along the banks.) From riverside pubs (although my personal London favorite, the Prospect of Whitby, doesn't rate a mention) to gardens, the river was a place of recreation. But it was also a place of death; just as Anne Boleyn rode along it in barges alongside Henry VIII, she later traveled to her execution in the Tower of London on the Thames, a route followed by her daughter, Elizabeth I, two decades later (to a happier outcome.) Traitors' heads were routinely displayed on London Bridge for all to see; the tale is that Margaret Roper, Thomas More's daughter, removed her father's head from a spike there after his beheading.
It's to be hoped that the City of London and all the other towns and cities that lie along the length of the Thames are suitably grateful to Peter Ackroyd for this elegant and beautifully written book. It's impossible to imagine that it won't create a sudden spike in tourism to the Thames Valley among as many readers as it reaches. I'm already planning my spring visit to a friend there. His home? Well, it's a modern condo built within an old Bermondsey wharf building and from the balcony overhanging the river, I can hear the sound of the water and watch all the watercraft travel between Westminster and Greenwich. And yes, I'll be packing this book to re-read while I sit there...

Chapeau! Kudos! Peter Ackroyd has done a terrific job with this book. From his early novel _Hawksmoor_, Ackroyd has evolved into the chronicler par excellence of London, both through his book of the same name and by the flavour of London life in his biographies of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Sir Thomas More, Dickens, Blake, and other works (both fictional and non).

This cornucopia has history, geography, geology, spirituality, sociology, literary and cultural referencing, psychology, life cycles, transport, trade, ecology, hedonism, commercialism. It's a staggeringly accomplished chronicle and a worthy tribute to the liquid heart of London.

Ackroyd ranges masterfully from facts and statistics - some of them fascinating - through to dreams and legends. Although London dominates, this deals with the villages and towns along the Thames - e.g., Windsor as represented by the poet Alexander Pope. The historical thread moves from the prehistoric river, and the Thames Caesar conquered, through to the modern flood protection afforded by the Thames Barrier. Notwithstanding its erudition, the flow is ceaseless and the touch light, so that it's an easy, satisfying read.

Thankfully, Ackroyd controls his trademark fascination in filth and murk aspects, balancing them judiciously with the elevated, refined and spiritual. He delightedly describes the Fleet as "merd-urinous", "wholly rank" and "the excremental centre of London's polluted life". This is tempered by the view "at twilight, a soft grey, a lacustrine light."

With its buried coins and weapons, syringes, severed heads, the river is a "depository of past lives" but Ackroyd gives us a final vision of "estuarial river" rushing to the "sea's embrace."

I can do no better than let the chapters speak for themselves:

1. "The Mirror of history": river as fact (statistics) and metaphor - the "museum of Englishness", symbolizing the national character. Time of the river: Hydrologic and geologic.
2. Father Thames - river deities, Thames Basin, birth/source aspects
3. Issuing Forth: tributaries, especially the Fleet.
4. Beginnings: Ice Ages, barrows, and henges; Caesar and Vikings.
5. The sacred river - saints and ruins: includes Norman palaces, Westminster Abbey, monasteries(work and education), plague and fire.
6.Elemental and Equal: riverine cycle/essence and social upheavals/revolutions.
7. The working river -: River boats, London Bridge and subways, river law and conservation; the criminal element (theft, witches); watermen, porters, weir keepers.
8. River of trade - wharves, mills, breweries, docks, modern decline - new financial districts e.g. Canary Wharf and Docklands.
9. The Natural River: fog, wind, rain, the Thames Barrier (flood protection). Sacred woods and trees, villages, swans and whales (!)
10. A stream of pleasure - pubs, sports, carnivals, Lord Mayor's pageant, physic gardens Contrasts with mortality, sewers, and typhus in the 18th-19th centuries.
11. The healing spring - wells, hospitals, flowers. A rhapsodic chapter....
12. The river of art - Turner, Conrad, Jerome - chroniclers (the 16th-century antiquarian John Leland), novelists (Dickens, Grahame), poets Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Pope, Shelley, Arnold.
13. Shadows and depth - Visions of Carroll and Traherne. Local history; dreams and legends.
14. The river of death - riverine findings (coins, weapons, syringes, severed heads). Mythology. Suicides, murders, drownings.
15. The river's end - the estuarial river which "rushes to the sea's embrace."

A grand achievement. Prepare to be delighted, amazed - and moved.

This 'biography' of the river was interesting for about the first 150 pages. However, Ackroyd's wordy descriptions and repetition of facts already presented became quite tiresome. At the halfway point I was already begging for it to be done, yet it continued dragging along. Finishing the book was a chore, rather than a pleasure, and was not worth the few interesting tidbits I now know, nor was it balanced out by the parts of the book which were actually enjoyable.

Ackroyd's book is like an Easter egg hunt. Within its forty-five chapters lies some delightfully written historical narrative that has one turning pages eagerly looking for more. By the second half of the book, though, one must look harder, reaching a point where entire chapters leave one wondering if there are eggs left to be found.

To be sure, if you are a fan of British history and literature - and enjoy good writing - this book will not disappoint. Stylistically, Thames, the Biography, is not presented as a conventional chronological biography. Rather, as Ackroyd lays out in Section I, he employs the device of using the River Thames as the ever-present bystander to the historical and cultural events that have taken place upon, around, and - sometimes - beneath it. He covers a lot of ground (and water) writing about those things you would expect in a book like this, and has clearly done his homework -- glaciation, the Celts and Romans, human sacrifice, the Venerable Bede, Milne, the Great Fire, the Docklands, Henry I - VIII, the Henley Regatta and, hey, even Jack the Ripper -- it's all there.

Like other reviewers have commented, though, some chapters seemed a real stretch ... as if his editor was pushing to get it to 400 pages (e.g. Chapters 27 and 28 -- "The Ancient Trees" and "And After Many a Summer Dies the Swan" left me debating whether I wanted to finish the book). And, yes, I agreed with the reviewer who observed that Ackroyd's oft-repeated baleful characterization of the River Thames begins to take its toll. All said, I'm glad I finished it.

While all of the book may not be an engaging read, if you can get past some questionable chapters and stylistic quirks it will provide you with a genuinely interesting and thorough education of the River Thames.

Thames is an elegaic celebration of the most famous river in history. It's author is Peter Ackroyd the prolific and erudite author of such previous bestsellers as "London"; "Albion" and "Venice." Ackroyd is also the author of well received biographies of such men as Thomas More, William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. The author has an encycopedic knowledge of the history, lore and lure of the Thames.
"Thames"is written in an academic style that some readers will have trouble digesting. It is also a harder read for those who have never visited England and seen the Thames. The Thames is 215 miles long, has over 100 bridges and is the liquid essence of what it is to be English. Ackroyd entertains the reader with short chapters dealng with such various topics as:
Workers on the River; Churches on the Thames; Legends and the history of the river. His brief sketches with maps included of the villages along the stretch of the river is fascinating!
Along the riverine stretch of the river there should be an anecdote to please the toughest critic. It takes time to work your way through these 400 pages but it is worth the journey. A knowledge of the Thames will enhance your enjoyment of an upcoming tour of he river if you are so lucky1 The book is also an enrichment of one's understanding of English literature, painting, music and spirituality. Some will find the book quite dull while others will enjoy it.

Peter Ackroyd's "Thames" scours the marshes and mud flats for traces of long forgotten civilizations and dredges up waterlogged mysteries.

He shows us the inky waters; infested marshes; dense fogs; overpowering stinks. This famous river was lined with toxic pudding-like mud, and bordered by mysterious ancient earthworks. Once inhabited by mud larks, costermongers, touters, carrot crunchers, lumpers, bargees, and scufflehunters, it is celebrated for the "gross abusiveness" of its fishwives, and watermen swearing all the way from Cricklade to Gravesend.

The Thames is "a highway, a frontier and an attack route, it has been a playground and a sewer, a source of water and a source of power." As the author called it -- a "museum of Englishness."

Peter Ackroyd's book captures the story in a series of snapshots -- brief chapters on the human occupation and natural history of this storied river. Some are familiar: dangerous work on the Victorian docks, the miserable lot of rural English poor, and life in Julius Caesar's and William Shakespeare's London. Other factors are invisible today -- how the Thames once flowed into the Rhine, its banks dotted with now lost religious manors and monasteries, rickety medieval bridges blocking Danish invaders, and what about the mysterious hordes of prehistory weapons and skulls deposited into the dark waters -- for what reason?

Through most of "Thames" the author keeps a firm hand on the tiller, navigating tales of geology, the arts, geography and life in such a way as we close the book, at last, amazed that these stories have gone forgotten -- and wondering what other interesting tales might be out there.

Mr. Ackroyd, somewhat miraculously, paddles downstream through all of this in over 400 pages. His subject material is wide and varied. On the one hand, it all adds up to a curious hop-scotch journey through British civilization. On the other hand, "Thames" is an entertaining snapshot of one of the most recognized rivers in the world.

My great-grandfather was found drowned "in mysterious circumstances" a century ago in this river named for "dark-grey ooze." A Land League agitator from Ireland, he met with Londoners before his demise. This sort of mystery attracted me to Ackroyd's riparian biography. Equally dismal and dreamy in its descriptions, Ackroyd rambles as he did in his "London" (also reviewed by me), but the effect here alternates between delight and dreariness.

He writes well, often. Crossing London Bridge, he sees it as a songline or dreamline reminding us of Australian aborigines, a synecdoche for the great city. "For a brief passage the vehicles and the people are brought into relation with the push and flow of the sea. The wind and the dust, the noise of the traffic and the cry of the gulls, are brought together." (133) In past London: "It might seem to the observer that life for the majority of riverside people was the sum of a dark house and a dark street but, where a thousand such houses are found together, there can breathe a spirit of adventure and of wonder." (181)

One drop of Thames is drunk by eight people, he somehow estimates, before it flows into the ocean. The width of the river mid-City is about a third of what it once was; nobody has been recorded to have survived a swim in fleeing pursuers across its City stretch, so dark, oozing, and unpredictable its cold depths. Its pastoral sounds make the author wonder if these are all that connect our experience of it with its ancient flow, perhaps 55 million years ago.

Suicides draw towards it as much as holidaymakers. "Tacitus relates that the Saxons, long before they colonised Britain, were prone to drowning their enemies in the river as sacrifices to the god Nerthus." (370) Its stretches contain filth, rot, pollution, and decay as well as regattas, day-trippers, and anglers. In it we see our reflection not so much mirrored as altered into a portrayal part "Wind in the Willows," part "Heart of Darkness."

However, as previous reviewers have noted, the effect as with "London" over hundreds of densely factual, or divergently lyrical passages may be one of languor. "Water is the mistress of flowing language, of language without interruption or surcease." (335) The spell of the river soothes Ackroyd as he labors to catalogue its wonders. Those of us far from its banks may or may not be enchanted by such a mass of information. This will aid historians needing a compendium of all data about the river, but it may, despite and because of Ackroyd's assemblage of detail, daunt casual inquirers.

This is a very interesting presentation of early (and more recent) history and geography of the Thames. I was interested to find the history at Abingdon and can believe it lives up to its billing as being the oldest continuous settled place in England.

A great disappointment. Merely a catalogue of disconnected facts. Lacks narrative or over-arching point of view.

It's not just a biography, it's THE biography. Peter Ackroyd's "Thames: The Biography" gives you everything you could possibly want to know about the river Thames, and plenty more. The book is a sweeping review of the geography, people, cities, towns, villages, flora and flora that are found along this riverine passage. And if you read the book, you should get used to the word "riverine", because it's used 62 times within the book's 481 pages.

To be fair, the book offers plenty of interesting material. It's exhaustively researched and chock full of names, dates, facts and figures concerning all manner of topics, from the truly historic to the unabashedly trivial. I enjoyed how the book is organized into short chapters, each covering some aspect of the Thames, but without much connection among them. The author's use of historical photos and drawings, as well as maps, is also very helpful.

I may have enjoyed the book even more if it had been about 60% shorter. The amount of minutiae is way over the top for my taste. It felt like the author didn't know when to say when, finding a paragraph (or two) for every scrap of information that he came across during his years of research. A strong-willed editor could have taken the hatchet to the manuscript and improved this book by leaps and bounds. Read The biography if you're interested in an enlightening trip down the Thames. But be warned that you're in for a very long and tedious journey indeed.