Extolling on a river

Rambling on in his typically oracular style - Ackroydese is one part poetry, another part gibberish - Ackroyd takes a voyage down the Thames, from its headwaters in the Cotswold Hills to the eerie stretches of the Thames Estuary, where the river spills into the North Sea. You have to put up with a lot of nonsense along the way, but he is a genial guide, and he looks at the Thames in all of its contexts: topographical, geologic, economic, religious, historic, and literary. He's after the same themes he's pursued in all of his books, which include biographies of Charles Dickens and William Blake, and scores of novels: the intersections of the mythic and the real in English culture; of the temporal and eternal; of past and present. For Ackroyd, the past isn't merely past; it's alive. He sees Caesar's armies ford the river, catches glimpses of Henry VIII and his wives sailing down the river in grand displays.

The Thames is only 215 miles long, but for Ackroyd, the river is infinitely suggestive. He takes note of the different kinds of weather to be found, and the "particular wind that scuds across the river." The wind generally blows in a southwesterly direction, which, Ackroyd explains, is why it's faster to travel downriver than up. But the same weather that makes the Thames beautiful has made it dangerous over the centuries. The river has erupted in devastating floods - in 1953, 300 people died and 24,000 homes were destroyed after a tidal surge from the North Sea raged up the Thames. London is now protected by the Thames Flood Barrier, one of the great engineering feats of the 20th century.

Britain's capital city and the Thames are inextricably linked, and some of Ackroyd's most pungent writing is inspired by the river's urban sections. The river was vitally important to London's growth as a commercial center and entrepot.