Londoners; The Days and Nights of London Now—As Told by Those Who Love
It, Hate It, Live It, Left It, and Long for It
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| www.bookswim.com |
A first night in a city is like a blind date; rarely what you
expect, and sometimes more than you bargained for. Often, as you dig deeper and
explore, it becomes something wonderful and rather untamable. The more you
know, the more you realize how little you know. And the courting period of
getting to know a city can last a life time. Each city has its own personality, as
any travel magazine will tell you: a conglomeration of all the stories and
people that made it and all the cities it was and is and will be. When author
Craig Taylor expatriated from Canada to London, he tried to wrap his head
around the true nature of the city.
But he realized to do so meant having a dialogue with both London and
those who lay claim to it.
So he embarked on a bit of an adventure and five years and two
hundred interviews later released his book in an attempt to find a definitive
answer to the question: who, or what, is a Londoner?
Taylor’s book reads as a very real cross section of the
richness and diversity of the city and all its quirks, and London is a city
with a lot of quirks. He takes the
reader of a broad sweep of the city, focusing in and panning out in all sorts
of directions and to the far reaches of the metropolis. He speaks to airline pilots, immigrants
and emigrants of many varied nationalities, a city planner, a dominatrix, a
Wiccan priestess, police officers, taxi drivers, and the woman who is the voice
of the London Underground. Each character is allowed their own voice, which
gives the book an honest tone that is also completely unromantic. There are
certainly some who wax poetic about the city, but all are as quick to bluntly
point out what is horrible about London as they are to praise it.
Reading this book is like overhearing eighty café conversations,
getting just enough to have a story, but with plenty of questions left over.
The book has a steady driving pace because of this; a new story was always
waiting 5 or 10 pages ahead. Some
of their stories are grand and epic, like Farzad Pashazadeh’s, who snuck into
the UK via Calais after being arrested in France for a travelling with a fake
passport. Some are simple, like Elisabetta de Luca describing her horrendous
work week as a commuter from the suburbs. Each voice and they story they tell
is intriguing and a refreshing reminder of how different the ordinary and
extraordinary lives of other people can be.
Even if you are not an Anglophile, this book is an intriguing
read. The author confesses in the
introduction that he isn’t one either; rather he lived there and was interested
in the people around him.. What the book really gets at is the way that those
crazy, beautiful people make up the flesh, blood and soul of a city, not just
architecture and famous thoroughfares. Does Taylor find a definitive answer as
to who the true Londoner is? You’ll have to find that out for yourself. But,
like in all things, perhaps it’s the journey that’s more important than finding
the answer.
Written by Meaghan O'Brien
