True Brits in Craig Taylor's 'Londoners'
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Londoners, writes Craig Taylor, are "moving moving, always moving." Commuters on Oxford Circus, 2010. Credit: Getty
LONDONERS: The Days and Nights of London Now -- As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It, and Long for It, by Craig Taylor. Ecco, 413 pp., $29.99.
What is London? It is "a city of delinquents." "It looks like a place that used to be something." "A place of divided belongings." "People always say to me, 'What's London going to be like when it's finished?' I say, 'Well, dead.' -- a finished city is a dead city."
The book is titled "Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now -- As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It, and Long for It." Whether or not you know London, whether or not you love it, this book is for you. It is a polyphonic hymn to the Big Smoke, but because London is one of the world's great crossroads, it is also a portrait of humanity in all its stinking glory.
Craig Taylor, a Canadian by birth and a Londoner by choice, spent five years listening to his neighbors talk about their town. A driving instructor, a squatter, a Wiccan priestess, a crematorium technician, a plumber, a fixer of antique clocks. Immigrants from everywhere, and Londoners who have left for anywhere else. The couple that lives in the Tower of London. A junkie for whom Big Ben is a symbol of hope. The woman whose recorded voice warns you to "mind the gap" on the Underground; her ex-boyfriend tells her he is haunted, hearing her wherever he goes.
The book is mapped out not by neighborhood but by actions. Arriving, making a living, getting along, living and dying. Londoners, as Taylor explains in his introduction, are "moving moving, always moving." I read the book in one sitting, and veered like a cyclist in heavy traffic from emotion to emotion as I loved or sympathized with or even hated one Londoner after another.
Although "Londoners" is a collection of interviews, Taylor's voice is present throughout, in perfectly poised introductory paragraphs and in the careful architecture of the whole.
One of Taylor's greatest triumphs is his relish for London slang, which he captures but does not fetishize. Nicola Owen, a teacher in a working-class school, tells a delightful story about her debate team, which she trained for a triumphant season. "It's just the best feeling when they're debating against these posh, private school boys," she explains. "They're like, 'Ladies and gentleman, you should really fink about it, because like you ain't gonna know nuffink and like Ahkmadinejad ain't gonna just like back off, he's gonna be like, no, I ain't backin' off.' . . . There's these boys across from them have their floppy hair and their ridiculously expensive clothes. You can see that when they start talking the boys just think, 'Ah, ha, well, we've obviously won this.' . . . Then you see it start to dawn on their faces while she's talking about, like, I don't know, community fragmentation or something. Then they suddenly start writing furiously."
Taylor shows us poverty, loneliness, wanton destruction and terrible waste. He shows us dignity, hilarity and the everyday survival of love and compassion. The pages are alcohol-soaked and smoke-stained. But they also glimmer with a rainy sort of hope, and a great deal of almost accidental tenderness. A Bangladeshi woman names her baby boy after her driving instructor, because he loved to discuss "Eastenders," a long-running soap opera, with her. A nurse who works in a V.D. clinic explains that the clap is a seasonal disease; she knows the rhythms of London loving by the ailments that follow after.
It is hard, reading this book, to remember that you aren't a Londoner, too. But maybe in reading it you have become one. After all, even the most casual and transient connections can remind us of our humanity. As Taylor muses, after a drug dealer calls him "bruv" while trying to sell him weed: "Someone calling you brother, calling you bruv, even for a moment, it counts, doesn't it?"
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