10 MAY 1997, Page 39

Not a capital tale

Ian Thomson

LONDON: THE NOVEL by Edward Rutherfurd Century, £16.99, pp. 829 There should be an Achievement Award printed on the last page of this book for anyone patient enough to reach it. According to my bathroom scales, London (ludicrously subtitled The Novel) weighs a good four pounds. Edward Rutherfurd has produced an historical romance about London which begins 400 million years ago and ends (by way of druids, etc) in 1997. The time-scale slightly overreaches itself. Rutherfurd relates how the River Thames was created in the ice age; even how Hrothgar the Dane was quite a bit taller than the average Saxon. This is part sword- and-sorcery saga, part history lesson for 10- year-olds. Anne Boleyn was 'an English rose', while the Gunpowder Plot was 'a sensation'. Serious history is a bore, so why not give it to them potted?

As fat as a phone book (and about as enlightening), London will sell by the container-load. Rutherfurd's previous offering, Sarum, was a publishing 'sensa- tion' of the 1980s. Another semi-historical saga, it charted Salisbury's existence from a prehistoric earth fort to a motorway city. Rutherfurd knows that attention to detail can make a bestseller. This lulls the reader into another world. Think of the turbo-jet fundamentals in Arthur Hailey's Airport, or the monkish interiors in The Name of the Rose. But these were enjoyable books while Rutherfurd's London is turgid and, with its main character a capital city spanning all human history, fails to engage. Still. Rutherfurd is nothing if not informative. Did you know that Saxon armour in Eng- land was the same as that used in all Europe? Cue long description of chain- mail manufacture ('Small, riveted rings of metal, usually about four-tenths of an inch. . . ') Did you also know that one of Saxon England's minor glories was the Wicker boat? Cue long description of how osier was woven into wickerwork. And so on.

Often London recalls the old Look and Learn magazines for children. 'The Vikings who swept across England in the ninth cen- tury were mostly Danish', we are told. With his fondness for druids and Roman centuri- ons, Rutherfurd also suggests an Asterix comic. One chapter, set in the year 604 (AD I think), opens: 'The woman stared at the sea. Her long hair fell loosely over her hunting dress, which flapped in the wind.' Flapped! None of this would be so bad if Rutherfurd lightened his 900-odd pages with some decent sex scenes (a staple of most bestsellers). Instead, all I could find was a coy allusion to the Elizabethan cod- piece. Unlike kin Sinclair, say, or even Peter Ackroyd, Rutherfurd has no feel for London. The city lies dead on the page, buried under a mass of thickening informa- tion about the Temple of Mithras, Magna Carta, Richard the Lionheart, the Plague (the 1348 one), the Peasants' Revolt, the Fire of London (the 1665 one) and, oh, let's jump on a bit, the Blitz.

Interestingly, the author leaps over 1960s London, as though he was beginning to tire of the silly project. In vain Rutherfurd tries to cobble together the centuries via the for- tunes of the Silversleeves and Gildersleeves families. Cedric, Wistan and other Saxons (like Ethelred the Unready) also appear to have their counterparts in modern London. The most galling thing about London, how- ever, is its pretension. Apparently the bells of St Mary Le Bow clang with that 'manly clamour that only the bells of England make'. London: The Novel is too big to put through the garden shredder. Will it fit an Oxfam shelf? The Saxons would have boiled it down for glue.