There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the 'human holocaust' of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. A good example of his approach throughout comes in the chapter “Far Under Ground,” where he personifies individual tube lines: “The Circle Line is adventurous and breezy, while the Bakerloo Line is disconsolate and brooding.” Readers who have experienced the same underside of London will find it difficult not to concede the accuracy of characterizations like these, however whimsical.Įlie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. Throughout, Ackroyd is at his most wildly associative and experimental. He provides the back story on how London’s geographical nomenclature is tied to its rich underground history, not to mention how this netherworld has become a source of terror and wonderment in the minds of surface-dwellers. He contemplates underground rivers and streams, the London Underground transit system and the “tube,” the elaborate network of sewers, tunnels, buried wells and springs, former bomb shelters, and, of course, the city’s cemeteries and catacombs. Alongside the usual straight-laced factual history, Ackroyd enhances his research with airy philosophizing, grandiose pronouncements and fashionable filth-mongering, all while teasing out the hidden meanings and subterranean lore of life under the capital.

“Like the nerves within the human body, the underworld controls the life of the surface,” writes the author. After recent years of reliable and prolific just-the-facts history on everything above ground in London (including the River Thames), the author lowers himself into the muck of London’s mysterious underworld in this compact but surprisingly diverse study. The indefatigable expert on the Big Smoke considers the history below London’s streets from a historical, mythical and psycho-geographical perspective.Īckroyd ( Venice: Pure City, 2010, etc.) has worn many literary hats over the years-historiographer, biographer and novelist, to name a few.

London under by peter ackroyd