The many voices of London
By Sarah Lyall |
March 2, 2012, Friday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
CRAIG Taylor had a rough time when he first moved to London from Canada a dozen years ago. Someone tried to pick his friend's pocket. A scam artist took advantage of him. Wandering around with an ancient A-Z street atlas, he often felt "lonely, duped, underprepared, faceless, friendless." But something about the city got under his skin, so he resolved to push beyond his own experience and take its measure. Happily for us, the result is "Londoners," a rich and exuberant kaleidoscopic portrait of a great, messy, noisy, daunting, inspiring, maddening, constantly shifting Rorschach test of a place, as befits the book's subtitle, "The Days and Nights of London Now - As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It, and Long for It."
Here are subway workers and sex workers; homeless people and millionaires; enthusiasts and malcontents; immigrants and old-timers; the practical and the dreamy; people going and people coming. Taken as a whole, they send us some way toward addressing that big-ticket question: What is London? How do you define a city so sprawling, so changeable, so varied? The answer, of course, is there is no one answer. My London is as different from your London as you are different from me. And though countless excellent books have been written on the city, this is the one that best captures what it's like to live in London right now, through the words of the people themselves.
Taylor devoted five years to collecting the material for "Londoners." He gathered stories from all 32 boroughs, conducting formal interviews with more than 200 people, running through 300 tape-recorder batteries and taking down enough notes to generate transcripts of more than 950,000 words. Fewer than half the people he talked to made the final cut. Some interviews took months to set up and lasted just a few minutes. Others went on for hours. Very occasionally, glimpses of Taylor himself emerge, as when he stays up all night with a hyper-energetic trader at New Spitalfields Market, a delightful scene that reveals his gameness for the project.
Anyone who conducts interviews for a living knows how hard it can be to get subjects to move past cant and cliche, to leave the platitudes and drive on to the good stuff. Londoners can be particularly tough nuts to crack. They may be talkative, but not to you, and there's hardly any of the sharing-with-strangers you find in, say, Dublin or even New York, where everyone has an opinion and, boy, do they want to express it.
There's a great deal of art behind his book's apparent artlessness. Except for a few scene-setting paragraphs here and there, we barely hear from him. But the material he elicits proves his skill. "Londoners" is a master class in self-effacing journalism. In an age of celebrity interviewers and bombastic television hosts, Taylor is the rare specimen who believes other people's words are more interesting than his own.
Oral histories are only as good as the people in them, and this is as good an array as you could hope for. We hear from an artist who spent seven months gathering stray human hair from the Underground and then used it to stuff a sculpture of his own head. "I liked the idea that I could have a little bit of everybody in London in something," he explains. "It was quite romantic and disgusting at the same time."
In Taylor's patient and sympathetic hands, regular people become poets, philosophers, orators.
Here are subway workers and sex workers; homeless people and millionaires; enthusiasts and malcontents; immigrants and old-timers; the practical and the dreamy; people going and people coming. Taken as a whole, they send us some way toward addressing that big-ticket question: What is London? How do you define a city so sprawling, so changeable, so varied? The answer, of course, is there is no one answer. My London is as different from your London as you are different from me. And though countless excellent books have been written on the city, this is the one that best captures what it's like to live in London right now, through the words of the people themselves.
Taylor devoted five years to collecting the material for "Londoners." He gathered stories from all 32 boroughs, conducting formal interviews with more than 200 people, running through 300 tape-recorder batteries and taking down enough notes to generate transcripts of more than 950,000 words. Fewer than half the people he talked to made the final cut. Some interviews took months to set up and lasted just a few minutes. Others went on for hours. Very occasionally, glimpses of Taylor himself emerge, as when he stays up all night with a hyper-energetic trader at New Spitalfields Market, a delightful scene that reveals his gameness for the project.
Anyone who conducts interviews for a living knows how hard it can be to get subjects to move past cant and cliche, to leave the platitudes and drive on to the good stuff. Londoners can be particularly tough nuts to crack. They may be talkative, but not to you, and there's hardly any of the sharing-with-strangers you find in, say, Dublin or even New York, where everyone has an opinion and, boy, do they want to express it.
There's a great deal of art behind his book's apparent artlessness. Except for a few scene-setting paragraphs here and there, we barely hear from him. But the material he elicits proves his skill. "Londoners" is a master class in self-effacing journalism. In an age of celebrity interviewers and bombastic television hosts, Taylor is the rare specimen who believes other people's words are more interesting than his own.
Oral histories are only as good as the people in them, and this is as good an array as you could hope for. We hear from an artist who spent seven months gathering stray human hair from the Underground and then used it to stuff a sculpture of his own head. "I liked the idea that I could have a little bit of everybody in London in something," he explains. "It was quite romantic and disgusting at the same time."
In Taylor's patient and sympathetic hands, regular people become poets, philosophers, orators.
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