Imagined London: A Tour of the World’s Greatest Fictional City

There is so much written about London that a book this small can only say so much. For those of us that already know London very well (the real place as well as the fictional) we learn more from this book about Ms.Quindlen and her limited life experience than anything else. In London she wanders the well worn tourist trail and has nothing new to say, it’s fascinating to hear her well read tourist’s perceptions of the city, although that is, in the end, all they are.

Most of her literary references are to classic nineteenth and early twentieth century novels thus limiting her scope to the aforesaid well trod trail. Very small contemporary fiction is mentioned. No childrens literature, no gay fiction, nothing that couldn’t be considered ’serious literature’ is referenced. Where is the London of P.L Travers, Zoe Heller, Paul Burston, Hanif Kureishi, Will Self, Alan Hollinghurst or David Baddiel to name a few ?

The section on the Borough is irritatingly packed full of factual inaccuracies such as her reference to the ‘Small Dorrit Church’ as though that was it’s name (it is really the church of St.George the Martyr and predates the novel by more than a century although this book gives the impression that it is a church commemorating a fictional character; there is a window depicting Small Dorrit there, but no-one locally refers to it as the ‘Small Dorrit Church’); this section sounds as though she spent an afternoon in the area and did very small research, she omits to describe anything in the area such as the wall next to the church that is possibly the last remnant of the Marshalsea so I am suspicious as to whether she even went there. If she is interested in Dickens, and I know from reading this book that she is, there were far more fascinating places to have written about such as the site of the blacking factory at Hungerford stairs, which is now Hungerford Lane and is the entrance to ‘The Soundshaft’ a club underneath Charing Cross station ; or she could have gone to ‘The Grapes’ in Limehouse to the pub described in ‘Our Mutual Friend’, but as I have said her scope is as limited as the average tourist with their free tourist map of “Historic and Literary London”. I found it very frustrating as there were so many places that I could have shown her that I’m sure she would have been interested in. She did the usual London tourist thing of barely venturing outside Zone 1. There is so much she is missing.
Rating: 1 / 5

This is the first book I’ve read by Anna Quindlen and based on the other reviews, I was expecting a much better book. I reckon the topic is fascinating and the author did have some excellent reflections, I just didn’t agree with the angle. I consider myself well read, but unless you have read all of Dickens and Thackeray’s work and are an expert in 19th century Brit-lit, you’ll feel like you’re missing something. The author does not do a excellent job of summarizing or tying these books to London, instead she just quotes passages at different geographic locations.

I also thought that she felt the need to justify her interest in London and literature by (bragging?) about how she voluntarily read these major works as a child and wrote school papers as a teenager as using British diction. I know she was trying to establish credibility, but it came across as pompous because she said it over and over. It would have been a more fascinating angle if she positioned this book as to why the READER should be interested in London and its literature, instead of why Anna was qualified to write about it.
Rating: 3 / 5