Imagined London - Anna Quindlen [41]
It would certainly be simple to decry this, to do as older Londoners do and sigh and frown and complain that the old place just isn’t as it was, as it was before the war, after the war, before the boom, before the bust, before the arrivistes and the new rich. But why ought the novels of today’s London mimic their forebears? Where’s the creativity (for writers) and the amusement (for readers) in that? The question seemed to be answered visually in the courtyard of Burlington House, which stands back from the throng of Piccadilly like an outraged dowager lifting her satin skirts. The Earl of Burlington’s town mansion is now the home of the Royal Academy, and, before its famous summer exhibition got underway in 2003, workmen were busy erecting a statue in the courtyard. The figure appeared to parallel the monument to Sir Joshua Reynolds, the eighteenth-century neoclassicist president of the Royal Academy; the sculpture stood catty-corner from Reynolds, facing him, triumphant on a pedestal, a torch in his hand. But, on closer examination, the torch was a microphone, the figure wearing jeans, and his physique not that of Greek statuary but of the modern health club and weight machines. (No Athenian was ever so ripped!) And inside the pedestal was a propane tank, so that from time to time the mike would spew a plume of fire. Perhaps the statue was an ironic comment on the bewigged figure facing it, cast in bronze, holding an artist’s palette. But it appeared to be imitation without reason.
The literature of London now reflects its modernity, as it should. It also reflects, less happily, the everywhere-is-anywhere ethos of easy air travel and effortless chain imports that has homogenized most of the developed world. Only the detective novels, perhaps needing some firm undeniable bedrock for their uncommon tales of murder, blackmail, and back channel plots, still draw heavily upon clear and specific delineations of place. And even one of the detectives of P. D. James—Baroness James, now, as London continues to pay homage to literature—lives in the new London, in a modern flat facing “the huge shining pencil” of Canary Wharf and the contemporary sprawl of Docklands.
P. D. James in 1987
Yet this change in arts and letters is all part of a discernible continuum, too. The descriptions of London in the novels of Martin Amis, for example, are as perfunctory as those in Defoe, but for quite different reasons. While Moll Flanders rattles off the names of the streets she travels with little or no description because her creator could be confident that his readers would be able to effortlessly conjure up the location, Amis’s protagonists do so because detailed descriptions of place are not the point in his novels, in which human psychology is both theme and location. “Chelsea, Blackfriars, Regent’s Park, Bloomsbury, Hampstead, and so on,” he says of one nomadic character. But for the extent to which these places are important in the action of the book, he could just as well have written “Chelsea, Tribeca, Park Slope, Greenpoint, and so on,” substituting the names of New York neighborhoods. The novel owes very little to a sense of specific place, and Amis seems to have considered the city in which he lives as little more than a platform for the universal anomie of his characters. It is only at the very end of London Fields that he becomes a flagrant Londoner, when he adds, in a kind of coda, “The people in here, they’re like London, they’re like the streets of London, a long way from any shape I’ve tried to equip them with, strictly