City of the Mind

"In American fiction from the 1980s, there are people writing about the sort of urban landscapes we’ve been discussing, the equivalent of the London Docklands—the financial districts and waterfronts. Think of someone like Bret Easton Ellis , or a book like Bonfire of the Vanities , works from the period that really encapsulate the high stakes atmosphere of the time, where the city becomes almost part of the plot—a surface or a foil for much that is garish or outrageous. To me, it’s fascinating that in Britain, we don’t really have an equivalent of that sort of fictional intrigue for the Docklands. This is one reason I chose this book, which has as its hero the architect of a building in Docklands. Penelope Lively writes quiet, very sensitive novels with much internal musing, all infused with a sense of the ghosts of history. Her books are about the ghosts of history, and by that I mean architectural history, too. Even though it’s a very similar landscape to the sort of American novels I’ve mentioned, the approach is like the total opposite, even though it’s a very similar urban landscape. Here, a British writer has approached that post-industrial, financialised urban existence in this very internal way. The hero of the story, this architect, is going through a divorce. It’s a novel about the big building that he has designed that’s going up in Docklands, where the building is a cipher for the history of Docklands. Our protagonist experiences weird pangs of historic angst, almost as if these are forces welling up out of the very ground and out of the docks themselves. His professional and personal life ravels and unravels around this cityscape, his divorce and the failure of his marriage, but also the healing that takes place. Unpeeling the layers, the architectural history of the Docklands reveals itself too through the construction of the building he is working on. “These works of fiction helped pull the scales from my eyes, and helped me think about architecture, the way that things that have been built in my lifetime” This idea of layers of history is a theme Lively comes back to often in her work. She wrote a brilliant children’s book , about a new housing estate, built upon an old landscaped garden. All of the old landscape garden features begin to show through. They seem to appear overnight in people’s estate gardens and even in their houses, hedges and horticultural details from the 18th century. And it’s a delightful thing! City of the Mind is like a much more serious exploration of that idea. Lively is clearly haunted herself by this idea of history reclaiming us. What an amazing way to approach Docklands, which were the product of the Development Corporation, where the clients were often huge US companies, designed around Canary Wharf, where massive skyscrapers created a kind of tabula rasa really, with no reference to the historic nature of this place. They were perhaps thinking about making history with this new landscape. Actually, the old landscape is still very much there, with its many weird ghosts of empire and trade and globalisation from a different era. This evocative treatment of an otherwise largely anonymous corporate development makes this a very powerful book. She’s written a lot of novels, won the Booker Prize, and is very well-regarded. Nonetheless, hardly anyone seems to have read this novel. That it seems a little obscure only heightens the appeal for me. A whole new wave of technology was needed to actually do this work of ever more complex finance, which wouldn’t fit in existing buildings. That partly explains the upward thrust, the large floorplans, the glass and steel. Technology has become a basic fact as a driver of new development."