Customer Reviews

Thames: Sacred River

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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.

I have just spent an enjoyable couple of weeks meandering through this book acquiring all manner of new knowledge.

While this book is a treat for the prose alone, the knowledge presented had me wanting to rush in many different directions to explore new possibilities. The story of the Thames is as much a part of British history as any conventional reportage of people and events.

The book would have benefitted from some tighter editing. As written, the text seems to suggest that Claudius was in Britain only a decade or so after Julius Caesar instead of almost 90 years later. While in the lifetime of the river itself this time difference is almost infinitesimal, it jars and is unnecessary.

I found myself drifting in the book: fascinated by the facts, interested by the speculation and intrigued by the possibilities. 'Water is utterly mysterious'

'Thames' contains a bibliography which provides a starting point for further exploration.

Highly recommended, but not necessarily as an authoritative source of historical dates.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith