Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, and the Road We're On

Well, Boris Johnson has popped his head from the freezer and apparently seen his shadow, guaranteeing Britain another five years of bullshit. Faced with a tanking economy, scathing international ridicule, and no support from his party, the British public nevertheless gave him the electoral mandate which, until now, he has lacked. As a longtime Anglophile, I care about this sort of thing. But I suggest other Americans should care, too.

Because American and British politics have a history of moving in tandem. Margaret Thatcher’s election preceded Ronald Reagan’s, and their two hand-picked successors, John Major and George H.W. Bush, collapsed almost simultaneously. Bill Clinton coined the term “special relationship” to describe his liaison with Tony Blair, a relationship that continued with George W., cementing American perceptions that the two major parties are more similar than different.

Most important, the Brexit vote came just months before Donald Trump won the Presidency on a technicality. Neither Trump nor Britain’s Conservative Party won a straight majority (which is pretty common in both countries), but both nations have a first-past-the-post election system that means a weak candidate can strategically half-ass their way into an overwhelming legislative majority, which Johnson’s Conservatives did yesterday.

(For Americans, and others unfamiliar with the British system, the Prime Minister isn’t exactly like the President. Queen Elizabeth remains Britain’s nominal head of state, though no monarch has publicly contradicted Parliament since Queen Victoria. The PM is an elected Member of Parliament, who gets further elevated by Parliament itself. This means the PM is usually the head of the majority party, and therefore rarely faces meaningful opposition from the legislature.)

So, follow me here. Britain looked at a government with unpopular policies, a history of racism, and demonstrations of both criminal intent and widespread procedural incompetence, and said: sure, we’ll have some more of that. This should worry Americans already concerned with the Trump administration’s visible lawlessness. The English-speaking world is apparently ensnared in some multinational cultural moment where anything goes, as long as aging White people permit it.

I don’t say “aging White people” flippantly. In Britain and the U.S., the longstanding demographics are changing quickly, as former majorities are increasingly displaced by immigrants. Bruce Cannon Gibney writes that, at present, White Baby Boomers outnumber all minority voting blocs together in America, but their youngest members currently qualify for AARP discounts at most restaurants and grocery stores. And when they die, Whites will slip into the plurality.

Immigration from Latin America, in the U.S., and from the former Empire, in Britain, have changed both countries’ voting and cultural profile. Not that the heritage has disappeared; William Shakespeare and Edgar Allen Poe won’t lose their status in the near future. But we cannot trust that the “normal” aggregate citizen will, in coming years, look like me. I think that’s great. Others consider that an assault on everything they treasure.

Many voters respond by aggressively rejecting the outside world. Donald Trump ran on a platform of undisguised racism, economic policies that kick the weak, and promising to quit international alliances that have secured America’s political and moral leadership since World War II. And he won. So Boris Johnson ran that same platform on steroids. Britain’s economy has been dwindling since the Brexit vote, and British voters apparently don’t mind.

America’s economy is apparently more fraught than Britain’s; our current growth rate mostly depends on who you ask. Trump’s greatest accomplishment is, apparently, to not submarine the boom economy he inherited from the previous administration. But his racism, his profiteering from office, and his undisguised disdain for democracy remain on public display. I truly fear, if something doesn’t change soon, we’ll see the electorate next year shrug and continue unperturbed.

I don’t say this flippantly. Just yesterday, the same day the British electorate returned Boris Johnson to power despite his historically unpopular policies, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee announced his intent to shepherd Donald Trump to a third term, in defiance of the U.S. Constitution. This President’s apostles have taken their hero, who is, remember, an admitted sexual harasser and probable rapist, and elevated him to the status of secular Messiah.

I'll be on @seanhannity 2nite @FoxNews at 9pm ET and will explain how @realDonaldTrump will be eligible for a 3rd term due to the illegal attempts by Comey, Dems, and media , et al attempting to oust him as @POTUS so that's why I was named to head up the 2024 re-election.

— Gov. Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee) December 12, 2019

Throughout my lifetime, the pattern has been clear: America and Britain aren’t the same, but they move on substantially parallel tracks. And the current track calls for the electorate to return a leader whose policies are massively unpopular, but who is personally somehow well-liked, to power, despite demonstrated incompetence in office. We who believe America has a moral mission in this world should take this as open permission to panic.

London Calling—Paul Cornell Calling Back

Paul Cornell, London Falling

When an invisible assailant kills a criminal kingpin inside the police nick, four London coppers get tasked to arrest a supernatural suspect. When their digging uncovers connections to an urban legend surrounding one of London’s rougher football clubs, they realize they’ve uncovered a serial crime going back a century. But when they touch a mysterious artifact, and become infected with The Sight, mere murder starts to seem like small beer.

Paul Cornell made his chops writing Doctor Who, and you can tell from this, his first non-franchise novel to appear in America. It has a similar “hidden reality” texture that Whovians will recognize, in which seemingly abstract events conceal a cryptic history underlying one of Earth’s major cities. But unlike the crafty, experienced Doctor, he deploys heroes here who are as adrift in their massively complex milieu as his readers.

These plainclothes coppers uncover a serial killer whose Brothers Grimm operation is matched in gruesomeness only by the damage she has done herself. But rather than a city eager to bring her in, they find London so bespelled by its own passions that a child murderer can hide in plain sight. And the underworld (in every sense of the word) has been so lawless, for so long, that they practically turn into Wild West marshals overnight.

Cornell incorporates a procedural bent not much used in American urban fantasy. Where novelists like Jim Butcher or Melissa Olson favor off-the-grid solo heroes, Cornell’s protagonists work within a government hierarchy, against a largely lawless underworld. Early on, his heroic quartet establish that they are not interested in justice; they intend to enforce the law. Even if it means they must bend the letter of the law to do so.

This gives his heroes a Fantastic Four quality, probing the margins of law and ethics to pursue an enemy who doesn’t share their compunctions. They can see magic, but they cannot control it, especially as they see the toll it takes on their enemies, who have become self-involved and subhuman. Throughout, they must fight the temptation to become as depraved as the supernatural degenerates they swear to bring to justice.

As with many of Cornell’s works, themes of religion and supernaturalism permeate his story. Believing in magic and witchcraft opens the door to something larger than human experience. Though DCI Quill barks early, “We don’t do theology,” they struggle with issues of Hell, transcendence, and eternal consequence. What does supernaturalism imply in a largely agnostic nation? (In interviews, Cornell calls himself a mildly observant Anglican.)

Cornell’s heroes establish early that the enemy they fight, and the Sight they use to fight it, is very London-specific. This villain could exist nowhere else, and their ability to fight derives from the city and its people. Thus, even for Anglophiles, this book assumes a distinctly British character. When DCI Quill lays into his subordinates in distinctive London idiom, you can practically hear him speaking in Jeremy Clarkson’s voice.

Fans of British television will recognize Cornell’s storytelling style: episodic, with shifting viewpoints and great personal angst. His story proceeds through an alternation of long, sometimes talky exposition, followed by sudden revelations designed to propel audiences into the next episode. We can practically hear the intertitle music. Nobody should feel surprised that, in his acknowledgments, Cornell admits he first conceived this story for TV.

This television quality translates well into Cornell’s prose style. His characters waste little time on introspection, proceeding through the tactile nature of the crime and their world. They reveal themselves through their words and actions, revealing their inner thoughts only as the investigation requires. Not for them the gradual intellectualism of Tolkien or Lewis; these heroes have a job to do, and no time for melodrama.

More cerebral fantasy devotees may not care for Cornell’s storytelling. Exposition centers on what characters see, hear, and do. Soul-searching bores him. He creates the kind of earthy, grounded, laconic characters familiar from classic British crime dramas like The Bill and Z-Cars, not the musing visionaries favored in current paperback fantasy. Cornell picks his audience in the way he tells his story.

But if that audience includes you, Cornell’s active narration and spare, muscular style may make a nice change. Like Rowling before her, Cornell may reawaken a love of reading in audiences grown numb on television. Having written both TV and novels, his storytelling feels almost bilingual that way. He sets the stage for an interesting series in this book; we’ll see if he keeps that momentum going.

Methinks the Limey Doth Attempt Too Much

Robert Wilson, Capital Punishment

When beautiful, evasive Alyshia D’Cruz vanishes from a crowded Islington street, her Indian industrialist father hires Charles Boxer, London’s best kidnap consultant. But these kidnappers don’t demand ransom, or anything else. As Boxer and the D’Cruz family watch, they seemingly just torture Alyshia for fun. Boxer desperately calls in cards with the Met, MI5, and several crime syndicates, before they break a young woman’s already precarious sanity.

British novelist Robert Wilson’s eleventh novel attempts to kick-start a new series, and starts off quite well, with an edge of psychological horror based on casual sadism. But around the halfway mark, he veers hard left, dumping everything into the stew: the Pakistani ISI, London chavs with excessive self-regard, a Muslim versus Hindu turf war in Mumbai, heroin, class war, and the kitchen sink. A taut thriller metamorphoses into a chaotic Guy Ritchie knockoff.

Charles Boxer makes a good antihero. Raised by a seemingly bipolar single mum, he joined the Army young, where his misplaced aggression became an asset. Now he saves other people’s children, and apparently sidelines as a contract enforcer. But he hardly knows his own daughter, and catches himself repeating his father’s mistakes. He sees his own death spiral, but wonders if he has the strength to pull himself out in time.

But instead of entrusting Boxer with a single mystery, Wilson has Alyshia re-kidnapped, first by two layabout Eastenders who want to get rich quick, then by an ISI general whose zeal has morphed into megalomania. Police specialists, intelligence agents, the Mayor of London, and everyone but the Queen’s Horse Guards get involved in the investigation, which turns out to involve vengeance, electric cars, and dirty bombs.

This is all a shame, because for the first 200 pages, Wilson really had a winner. I wanted to know what dark secrets the kidnappers were trying to torture out of poor Alyshia, and what sordid past Frank D’Cruz wanted to conceal so badly that he would consider letting his daughter die. Wilson tossed us enough pieces that I wanted to assemble the whole jigsaw. I thought: this is really good. Everyone should read this taut, smart thriller.

Wilson admits that absent fathers are a recurrent theme in his writing. Charles Boxer’s father vanished when he was a kid, and now Charles is trying to avoid vanishing from his daughter’s life. But this theme has its obverse: Alyshia D’Cruz is fleeing her father, for reasons that Boxer teases out only with great difficulty. And Boxer’s daughter, Amy, won’t let her father get close after years of absence; she resents him so much, she’d rather punish herself than let him in.

These tensions drive much of the plot. How do you kidnap and adult who doesn’t want to be found? How do you psychologically punish somebody who seemingly has no conscience? As people do in extreme situations, these characters reveal their true colors, the inner identities they’ve tried to hide even from themselves. Not surprisingly, what they uncover often is not pretty. Heroes and villains trade places; people kill strangers to keep their families together.

Then Wilson turned on the cast of thousands, turning a cerebral drama into a London farce. Not that I mind London farce; Snatch is a classic film. But the change in tone is so jarring that this feels like two books, awkwardly stitched together, like reverse Siamese twins. Maybe that second book would have been good, too, if I’d just known it was coming. But when this novel should have opened into something profound, Wilson chose to kick readers in the teeth.

It feels as though Wilson doesn’t trust himself. He creates smart psychological tension, but seems afraid that, without a broad physical confrontation, readers won’t stick with him. So, just as we reach what looks like a turning point, where smothered secrets will finally see the light of day, he swerves, giving us a gun battle, followed by moments of low comedy. He has us sitting on the edge of our seats, and then he has us throwing our hands up, screaming “No he didn’t!”

This book has many admirable qualities, and I suspect a stern editor could have turned it into a smart nail-biter—or that and a sequel, each with their own strengths. I’m not sorry I read it, and I’m piqued to see more of Wilson’s books. But Wilson just tries to do too much, and as a result spreads his narrative thin. I like plenty about this book; I just don’t love it.

Susanna Clarke's New Fantastic Tradition

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part Four
Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: A Novel

Britain is, for lovers of literature, a magical place. Its history of poets and wordsmiths tangles back to time out of mind, conjuring images that exceed its small area and population. But if you read recent Brit Lit, it has a distinct atmosphere of discouragement about it. So when English author Susanna Clarke recaptures pre-Victorian times in a heroic fantasy, we know exactly what she means when a character asks: “Why is there no more magic done in England?”

Clarke tells a story that delves into two worlds at once. Her plot, stripped of the language in which she clothes it, tells of two men, wanderers outside their time. Gilbert Norrell is a collector, an introvert, a man with his head in the clouds. Jonathan Strange, who first apprentices to Norell before they descend into rivalry, is eminently practical, a man of the people. And both of them happen to be wizards, with power unmatched in Britain since time of myth.

But Clarke doesn’t strip the story of its language. The events of her story don’t just happen; they happen in a very specific context. Hers is the world of Jane Austen and Laurence Sterne, of Mary Shelley and Sir Walter Scott. And the language she uses painstakingly reconstructs the time in which its set. Clarke infuses her words with the intricacy, lyricism, and humor of Britain’s pre-Victorian heyday, a time when, for literature lovers, England still had magic.

Because the time in which she sets her story is so well known, Clarke feels free to insert characters who will be instantly recognizable to readers. In addition to the title heroes, Clarke trots out stock characters like Sir Walter and Lady Emma Pole, and the slave Stephen who possesses practical wisdom his masters don’t share. She also uses historical figures: George III, Lord Nelson, and Lord Byron make cameo appearances.

Any college-level Brit Lit survey course will spend the longest amount of time on the years surrounding the Napoleonic Wars. Ironically, the years when England produced its greatest linguistic magic corresponded with the years when the land was nearly at greatest risk of disappearing from the globe, second only to the Blitz. Perhaps the fear that their culture might not last long gave the Limeys reason to remember they had a culture.

Susanna Clarke

And the works produced in that time have been a mixed blessing. On the one hand, the linguistic flowering that began with Marlowe and Shakespeare bore fruit in the days of Wordsworth and Johnson. On the other, because the pre-Victorians accomplished so much, they have linked British letters to a veritable industry of nostalgia. No wonder English Literature progressed through Victorian weariness to the sooty, emasculated world of Amis and le Carré.

Clarke at once channels that nostalgia industry, by recapturing the pre-Victorian tone, and challenges it, by forcing a conflict between the past and the present. Just as Austen’s excessively prim patriarchs subtly mocked the mores of her time, Clarke’s wizardry mandarins, frozen in their worship of the past, point the finger at today’s professors and librarians. Our best work is not behind us, Clarke says. But we have to actually do that work.

But it’s not just about who creates the work. By mocking the nostalgia industry, Clarke also indicts us readers for keeping our eyes turned backward. We, like the authors, are not living up to our potential. We are creating a system of rewards in which all of us feel free to rest on the accomplishments of the past. And we have convinced ourselves, by lionizing how good things used to be, that we can never be that good again. Shame on us.

As the forces our title heroes unleash turn on them, forcing them to overcome their rivalry for the greater good, Norrell and Strange go on a journey in which they come to grips with the future. Neither Norrell’s dusty historical scholarship nor Strange’s practiced applications mean anything when apocalyptic forces threaten. England is changing around them, and they must find the strength to change with it. They have so much to accomplish, if they (and we) will survive.

And the same applies to us. The broad, fantastic world Clarke reveals indicts us for accepting smallness and diminished hopes. She challenges us to honor the past by making a present, and planning for the future. In short, she tells us that, if we fear there is no magic being done in English, we have no one to blame for that but ourselves.

A Good British Comedy Goes Awry

Michael Frayn, Skios: A Novel

Michael Frayn is a writer who makes other writers jealous, because he can dip into new forms easily and often. Though he made his name as a playwright, and his Noises Off is standard repertory for regional and educational theatre, he has also written highly successful, award-winning novels and nonfiction. (As far as I know, he’s ducked poetry.) After ten years away from novels, he returns with a farce whose noble ambition perhaps exceeds its capacity.

London playboy Oliver Fox hates himself and his reputation, and already regrets the weekend rendezvous he’s arranged with a girl he hardly knows. At the baggage claim on the Greek resort island of Skios, he steals the luggage, and the life, of Dr. Norman Wilfred. It seems Dr. Wilfred is committed to speak at a prestigious but shady philanthropic foundation. Oliver’s natural charm wins over wealthy Americans, but he will soon have to deliver a lecture on a topic he knows nothing about.

Elsewhere on the island, Dr. Norman Wilfred can’t find his luggage, his connections, or anything that brought him to Greece. A strange, inarticulate cabbie has dropped him at a decaying holiday villa with an emotionally unstable co-ed, and calling the foundation’s desk just leaves him trapped among goats. As he grows increasingly desperate, he starts to question everything on which he’s built his life, and whether this strange, pretty woman might not be the salvation he needs.

This book starts as a traditional British comedy of manners. In one plotline, Oliver digs himself a hole he knows he can’t get out of, yet he enjoys the attention (and the pretty coordinator) so much that he can’t stop himself. In the other plot, Dr. Wilfred’s Oxbridge pretensions slowly unravel. A primal, lusty caveman lurks beneath his cultured restraints, but the woman he now loves doesn’t share his passions, much less understand. Jane Austen lovers would approve.

But this is Michael Frayn, and anyone familiar with his work knows he loves to watch lies unravel. Over the course of two hot Mediterranean nights, people pin their hopes on the air, then watch everything fall down around them again. Angry declamations lead to heady cross-island pursuits. Jilted lovers, thought long gone, suddenly reappear. Secrets prove impossible to conceal, and someone pushes Dr. Wilfred to reclaim his life, even though he no longer wants it back.

The giddy pace and emotionally intense storyline feel like they would work on stage or screen. The book is fast-paced, and you can read it in two evenings, but prose puts a limit on something like this. Specifically, where a movie or play drags audiences along and forces them to keep up, readers can put the book down and ask themselves questions. Farce doesn’t do well answering questions. It relies on an audience that remains, in some way, permanently confused.

In pursuit of that, as we approach the end, the dramatis personae takes a quantum leap. People briefly mentioned in early chapters suddenly become major players in the story. A gentle, intimate comedy suddenly has a cast of thousands, all of whom talk past each other. Roger Ebert would call this an Idiot Plot, a story of epic misunderstandings that could easily resolve if one person told the truth. That is, if anybody else were listening.

Which is a shame, because the early chapters are quite good. They contain deep psychological insights and complex cantilevered motivations, all for characters so complex that they can’t understand themselves. We laugh good-naturedly with these characters, at first, because we know them better than they know themselves. They remind us of people we all know, the kind of people who could benefit from a long, solemn conversation with their own bathroom mirror.

Perhaps Frayn is dissatisfied with subtle character humor. Perhaps a writer who made his name slipping philosophical insights into panicky farces thought he needed the big laughs to sell the conclusion. Even he knows how confused the product winds up looking, since he includes a chapter explaining how this story would end in an ordinary farce, right before he suddenly swerves, giving us a conclusion that has little to do with everything that came before.

This should be such a good book. It’s insightful, funny, and rueful, right up to the moment where it implodes. I enjoyed the early chapters, and thought perhaps Frayn was bringing back an older form of gentle but surgical comedy. Then, in the clinch, it turns into stampeding entropy. So close, and yet so far away.

Boris Johnson and the Summer of London

Boris Johnson, Johnson's Life of London: The People Who Made the City that Made the World

Flamboyant London mayor Boris Johnson loves his city. Not just the city as it is, either: the city he governs, in which everyone jockeys for the chance to snap pics of their beloved “Boris” on his bike. He loves the whole historic sweep, from Roman foundations around a convenient tide pool, through Saxon hegemony and Elizabethan pomp, to Churchillian perseverance and modern rock stardom. And he wants to share that love with you.

Boris recounts the history of his city in seventeen personalities, nine inventions, and two structures. Some of it seems obvious: how can we survey London without stops on Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Florence Nightingale? Others may take readers by surprise: when we think of London, few of us remember Lionel Rothschild or Emperor Hadrian. And who knew that London gave us the three-piece suit, the municipal sewer system, or ping-pong?

Already available for a year in Britain, Johnson’s smart, witty, surprisingly touching tome has hit American shores in time for 2012, the Summer of London. With the Queen’s Jubilee and the Summer Olympics, the world has turned its eye to the City in a way it hasn’t since the Carnaby Street heyday. Boris makes the case that our interest should last beyond the here and now.

This cracking yarn starts with Boudica, the Iceni queen whose claim on London was that she destroyed it. When its marble collonades represented Mediterranean intrusion on fair-skinned Britain, London earned unmatched Celtic wrath. Yet the city proved resilient. First Romans, then Saxons, competed to rebuild and improve it. St. Mellitus considered it so important that he built the first St. Paul’s Cathedral from driftwood and glue.

William the Conqueror claimed he won England at Hastings, but even he couldn’t call himself King until London knelt—which it almost didn’t do. Parliamentary gadfly John Wilkes lit a fire of civil reform in London, one which found its truest home in the Americas. And Keith Richards, initially passed over by the cruel post-war meritocracy, refused to bend until he had remade himself as the bard of a generation.

Boris Johnson

Boris turns out to be a remarkable storyteller. He brings together solid history, fanciful folktales, and new discoveries in archaeology and anthropology, to spin London as a yarn of hard-fought but glorious accomplishments. Persons who could have vanished into history’s morass become giants, in a way they only could in a city like London. Boris tells his tales in a breathless, wheeling, funny, and even mildly naughty tone that hooks readers eagerly.

This unabashedly mythmaking turn at pop history carries the same vigor that has made Boris an international phenomenon. He doesn’t even pretend to represent everything about the city. He acknowledges, for instance, the shocking inequality created by the Industrial Revolution, but doesn’t linger on it. And he extols the “great deeds of gread men” (and some women), creating a history that happens primarily at the top.

But maybe that’s the point. This isn’t supposed to be dry documentarian history, talking about everyone in an undifferentiated mass. This is the mythic story of a city where anything can happen, and look! Sometimes it does! A woolspinner’s son from upriver can turn into the greatest crafter of language ever, as Shakespeare did. A Cockney barber’s son can remake the world of art, just like JMW Turner. Wow, just think what you or I could do.

Johnson anchors his story to the present, as mythmakers do. He locates ancient landscapes according to modern street maps. Some great battle took place where a building now stands. The ancient Rothschild home, he says, has been replaced by a motorway. This melding of past and present ensures we understand that history matters because, in a real way, it’s still with us.

Perhaps most remarkably, most of the personalities Boris so lovingly recounts were, like Boris himself, born elsewhere. King Alfred the Great retook the city from the Norse and restored its greatness, but he was a Winchester man. Samuel Johnson, tabloid firestarter WT Stead, and showman mayor Dick Whittington all immigrated from the provinces. Some of Boris’ great Londoners aren’t even British.

London, for Boris, is more than a place. It’s the opportunity to remake ourselves, to encounter new ideas and more diverse peoples, and become the spirits we were meant to be. If America is the new Shining City on a Hill, as one President claimed, it inherited that role after that honor straddled the Thames for nineteen hundred years. Boris tells an exciting, spirited yarn. And he makes his city a true hero.

A Cautionary Tale in How to Write Historical

Susan Elia MacNeal, Mr. Churchill's Secretary

Historical fiction writers have to walk a fine line: how much detail is too much? Historical mystery writers have double that problem. After all, history is about sharing detail, while mystery relies on withholding detail until just the right moment. Authors can find it easy to share too little, keeping audiences confused, or hitting readers with a firehose of undifferentiated information. Sadly, in her debut novel, Susan Elia MacNeal chooses the latter option.

British born but American raised, Maggie Hope only intended to stay in London long enough to sell her late grandmother’s house. But the outbreak of World War II reawakens her “King and Country” sentiments. She joins the staff at 10 Downing Street, only to find that her old family secrets are less than secret in the halls of power. As war moves from possibility to reality, she becomes enmeshed in the inner workings of a country she still hardly knows.

Halfway through this book, one member of Maggie’s inner circle accuses another of a years-old rape. These two have sat to dinner together, carried on political conversations, and attended parties, without a hint of animosity. Neither character gives any hint of a prior history until two pages before the secret comes spilling out. This revelation occurs, I suspect, simply because the author thinks thinks we need one at this juncture.

Understand, please: this happens at the midpoint of a putative mystery, though no detection takes place. Despite a teaser intro about the murder of a member of Winston Churchill’s typing pool, the death occupies less than five of the subsequent 170 pages. A secondary plot about the IRA, Nazi sympathizers, and fifth columnists feels tacked on from another, possibly better book. The author’s attempts to sandwich in some red herrings are painfully obvious.

Instead, MacNeal barrages us with hundreds of pages of historical detail. This includes windy street scenes, descriptions of London before and during the Blitz, the privations of living in Britain on the brink of war, romances that begin and end with precious little detail, and extended soirees and assorted nightlife vignettes. While a few such scenes might have made interesting background, they swell to occupy numerous, interminable chapters. I could have read this in any war memoir.

Susan Elia MacNeal

Between these scenes, MacNeal continues to bury us. Several pages brim with transcripts of Churchill’s speeches to Commons, larded out with many authorial insertions about the characters’ emotional responses. In other places, characters have long, windy conversations about then-current affairs. Partway through one such discussion, which ran over ten pages, I realized the characters weren’t really talking to each other; they were explaining the history to me.

Then, while flooding us with so many external details, MacNeal withholds personal detail. One major part of this story deals with Maggie Hope’s elusive father, whom she believes dead. So many characters state so many times that she must not discover the truth, that I think I break no confidences to say that Maggie discovers he did not die when she thought, and everything she believed about him is false. MacNeal practically signals this fact with jazz hands.

Sometimes I praise books for their “cinematic quality.” Usually I mean that details are well realized, and the author communicates important points in actions rather than telling us what to think. I don’t mean a compliment this time, though. Scenes consistently break on cliffhangers, and so many chapters end with sudden revelations that readers can practically hear the cheesy organ music. This doesn’t read like a book so much as a treatment for an unproduced movie.

Prior to this novel, MacNeal’s greatest literary triumph was a book of recipes for mixed drinks. For some reason, she has chosen to move from the world of how-to, in which everything must be spelled out as explicitly as possible, to the world of literature, in which authors must make choices. Unfortunately, she still writes like every thought, image, and detail which occurs to her deserves a place on the page.

An author like Charles Todd uses history as milieu for an active story. For MacNeal, history is the story. Todd gives enough historic context to keep readers engaged, and focused on the characters. MacNeal uses the characters as authorial sock puppets to explain the history, and never quite gets around to her own story. I blush to admit, after the unearned midpoint revelation, I put this book down, and now can’t bring myself to pick it up again. And I see no reason I should.

London—the Promise, the Dream

With the Olympics coming, the eyes of the world will turn to London this summer. But they will not turn to the real London; they will turn to a deliberately designed confection that will come down when the games leave town. Real people will continue to live in the city, sweeping streets and driving cabs and acting in theatres, servicing tourists, and teaching schools. London will continue being a real human city.

Canadian-born journalist Craig Taylor, who has adopted London as his own, looks at the real city in Londoners. Not the street maps or the tourist landmarks, but the people who walk those streets. He follows the people—the prestigious and the humble, the wealthy and the workaday—and lets them tell their own stories. And those stories really uncover the sparkling human beauty that lies beneath the Tourist Bureau veneer.

Ranging from a few lines to several pages, the stories Taylor gathers emphasize the scope of a city that draws people with visions of upward mobility. Dreamers, like the business student or the ex-convict or the expatriate, who strive to build new lives. The rapper, the photographer, the teacher, who try to leave something bigger behind them. The civil engineer, the barrister, the driving instructor, who just want to build a better London.

Some of the stories are remarkably revealing. Though known internationally as a financial powerhouse, a floor broker reveals that “Londin” is a stratified mess that reduces its citizens to mechanical drudges. A South Bank dominatrix describes the magnitude of subcultures that percolate under the surface of urban anonymity. Two bus operation specialists reveal the effort necessary to keep a city of millions thriving.

My favorite story is told by Sarah, a South London “skipper”—what Americans would call a “dumpster diver.” But as she lays out her life story, she actually reveals the life of a transsexual as the son of immigrants with old-world values. The contradictory pulls between urbane British modernity and the continuity of culture lie under most of what Taylor says about London. Dumpster diving is only part of a much wilder story.

And that is, beyond a doubt, the most important message Taylor gives us. Despite its millenia of history and its grand Gothic architecture, London exists very much in the present tense. People come to the city to shed their history and become new, and because of that, the city constantly reinvents itself. Unlike outlying Cotswalds crofters’ villages and Welsh hay farms, London does not pass its culture on to the next generation.

Those who, like me, imagine stepping outside our lives and remaking ourselves in a city like London can read a book like this and imagine. Whether we hope to follow through and learn from those who went before, or we decide this isn’t really the path we prefer, Taylor’s narrative speaks to anyone who has dreamed big. In that way, it’s not really about London; it’s about the part of ourselves that wants something more.

Do not expect to find maps, directions, and highlights for outsiders. Taylor does not care about travel and tourism. He does not try to teach us the parameters of pub culture. (If you want that, I enjoyed this year’s Fodor's England.) Instead, Taylor would rather create a biography of a city that refuses to stand still. His style and sweep make it come to life; Taylor’s London is a place we can imagine immersing ourselves in. We could walk to the corner, the workplace, or the store, and meet these people. London is so very real.

Taylor’s London is also more. It’s the heart of the dreams we all carry. The prerelease press pack compares Taylor’s book to American oral historian Studs Terkel, which is fair. Like Terkel, Taylor celebrates the people who turn the wheels, not the people who reap the benefits of the turning. But I would also compare him to historians like A.L. Morton and Howard Zinn, writers of “history from below.” Like them, Taylor believes that life happens in the streets, in the shadows, not in the spotlight of public acclaim.

This is no small book. Running over four hundred pages and over eighty interviews, Taylor takes readers on a real journey, not a package tour. But we don’t want a package tour, sanitized, with all the hard edges sanded off. Like a real visit to a strange city, Taylor gives us the pleasure of getting lost, seeing amazing new sights, and making our own discoveries. And what we find more than justifies the trip.