London

London – by Edward Rutherford

It’s impossible to even look at the cover of this book, without ever reading it, and not think of the author  James Michener. Michener was the master of titling many of his epic novels with a geographic location, and then tell the story of that location with a wide array of characters that would usually span thousands of years. The purpose of this type of novel is to tell a great story, but to also make the characters somewhat secondary so the author can focus on the many events that shaped the particular location where the stories take place.

And, yes, this book does just that.  It begins many years before Christ and ends around 1940 when Hitler unsuccessfully tried to bomb the city of London into submission.  Throughout the two thousand years or so, we focus on the same few ‘families’, so each time we arrive in a new century with a new story, we’re meeting the ancestors of characters we’ve already met.   However, I was left with the impression that Edward Rutherford doesn’t quite do as good of a job as James Michener normally did; at least not in this book.

First, Rutherford covers way too much ground and it feels like, as a reader, I scarcely had time to catch my breath. Every time I would start to settle into another ‘time’, I would quickly be jarred 5, 10, 20 years in the future, and I had to unscramble my brain to keep up with the progression of all of the characters, their new surroundings, their new children, their different predicaments, and so on and so on.  To the author’s credit, he tries to keep his reader grounded by pointing out the obvious similarities between the family members over the generations.  The main family in this book, for example, are always distinguished because it seems like they all have a ‘white patch of hair’ in the center of their forehead, along with webbed fingers.  This is the authors way of telling you that you’re reading about a descendant of some of the characters you’ve already read about earlier in the book. It helps somewhat, but I kid you not, it seemed like this book contained about two or three dozen characters over its 2000 years that have this physical peculiarity.   I simply couldn’t keep up.

I also wish that he would have focused a tad bit more on the last couple hundred years.  Whenever I think of ‘historic’ London, I think of the 1800s when people like Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Florence Nightingale and Alexander Graham Bell roamed the streets.  Sadly, this doesn’t really happen. If I’m not mistaken, by the time we get to page 800 or so (out of an 1100-page book), we’re still stuck in the 17^th or 18^th century.  This book was a tad too weighted on ‘The Middle Ages’ for my tastes. I was hoping for more latter-day stuff; at least when the horse and buggy was predominant.

Then, the author also seems to feel obligated to inundate his reader with ALL of the history of London.  Each time we read a new section, we have to read about the architecture, the politics, the key political figures, the royalty, the achievements, the origins of the nomenclature and on and on. It was oh so easy to just lose interest and tune out.   I must admit, it’s kind of cool to read about the (tragic) history of ‘Ring around the Rosie’ and the origins of things like ‘Greenwich Time’, but again, it simply seemed like too much.

The good news is that when Edward Rutherford is actually telling a story, he tells a really good story. This leads me to conclude that had he not tried to put SO much here, I might have enjoyed the book a bit better. I confess there were times near the end when I simply wanted to finish the thing, and I didn’t really care too much about what happened in many of the latter chapters.  In fact, I must admit there were a few chapters near the end that I just skimmed through much of the minutia hoping to come across some story. Sometimes I was successful, other times not so much. 

More good news is that the sentiment of many of the Amazon reviewers seems to be in agreement with me, and most state that, of all of Rutherford’s works, this one isn’t as good as many of his others. Since this was my first book by this author, this means I’ll definitely pick up one of his other books and try him again. As I said, he does know how to tell a good story when he’s not trying to give his readers a detailed, mundane history lesson.   

I would conclude by saying that I felt that this book could have been twice as good if it were only about half as long.