Peter Ackroyd is a literary compulsive, an open tap that won’t stop gushing. In the past seven years he’s published 15 different books in four different genres, worrying away at topics – London, the nature of the “English genius” – that have obsessed him his whole writing life. Barely pausing between the last full stop of one project and the first word of the next, he’s rushed out since the millennium an 800-page history of the capital, followed by a 500-page book on the English imagination and a 550-page life of Shakespeare. In between there have been three novels, umpteen children’s books and smaller, slighter biographies of Chaucer, Turner and Newton. The man is simply unstaunchable.

Weighing in at more than 500 pages, Thames: Sacred River is the latest thudding entry in the Ackroyd bibliographic ledger. A sequel to his bestselling London: The Biography, the book mimics in almost every respect its celebrated sibling, approaching its subject in thematic chapters rather than chronological order, and mixing fact with anecdote and mythological speculation in its search for comprehensiveness.

The links between the two volumes are more than just structural. The Thames, Ackroyd asserts, is the lifeblood of the city, “the epitome, the liquid essence, the spirit, of London”. Like the metropolis through which it flows, however, the river is a thing that “Londoners themselves rarely attend to”. Wading around in its turbid history, Ackroyd wants to reanimate it for a generation that has lost touch with its watery roots.

His magpie inclusiveness (the book covers everything from spirits to swans and sanitation) can sometimes be strikingly effective. Looking for evidence to support his claim that the Thames is now cleaner “than at any time in its history”, Ackroyd notices how lush the bankside is today compared with the landscape in Turner’s sketches. Trying to estimate the scale of trade that used to ply its way along the river, he discovers as many as 1,700 wharves that once dotted the route between Brentford and Gravesend. The phrase “toerag”, he points out, comes from Millwall docks, where workers shifting grain wore sacking over their boots, while the word “tosh” comes from the “toshers” or watermen who regularly dredged the river for “flotsam” (articles found floating in the water) and “jetsam” (goods deliberately thrown into the water).

Ackroyd is equally happy pondering archeology, legend and grimy industrial history in his search for elusive, eye-opening anecdotes. Pointing out the strange frequency of severed heads in the river, he takes us first to Battersea Bridge, where the huge number of ancient skulls found near there earned the place the nickname of a “Celtic Golgotha”, then downriver to Cannon Street where 48 more were discovered in the Walbrook toward the end of the last century. Turning to medieval literature, he cites a claim by one Norman poem that Canute’s feet were lapped by waves not on the Sussex coast, but the shores of the Thames. And venturing back to the docks, he explains how the fear of fire meant that 19th-century cranes were powered by treadmills rather than steam, with eight men at a time trudging forlornly round their giant wooden cylinders.

Despite these appealing nuggets, however, the book is dogged by an unmistakable sense of drift. Partly this is to do with the nature of the river itself, with Ackroyd failing to deal with the pastoral upper reaches as convincingly as the built-up, metropolitan stretches. In the city, among the streets he knows so well, he feels on solid ground; upstream, he often flounders and blusters.

The book suffers, too, from some unedifying sloppiness. Ackroyd can be markedly shaky about dates, either failing to mention them altogether or simply getting them wrong. Claudius, for instance, didn’t invade Britain 10 years after Julius Caesar, but nearly 100; and the Roman writer Avienus did not write in the 6th century BC, but the 4th century AD. Over and above this, the pages are littered with repetitions and contradictions, and cluttered with uninformative, half-digested lists. Provisional assertions abound, with maybes tripping over mights, and he has a habit of making spurious connections that simply lack validity. Does the fact that he can list dozens of Thames-side churches named St Mary really mean that the Virgin has an intimate connection with the river as “the most powerful of all the water goddesses”?

More egregious than all of this, however, is the sheer wrongheadedness of the book’s mystical speculation. Ackroyd has never been shy of such notions, but here they swamp the book. Clutching at any passing spiritual straw, he summons up every nymph, god, spirit and sprite who comes to mind to support his notion of the river as a sacred thoroughfare. Aboriginal tribal lore, ancient Egyptian ideas of godhead, the indistinct figure of St Birinus, all are grist to the mill. Geological strata become “ribbons in the hair of Gaia”, trees become “the presiding spirits of the river”.

Hastily written, and showing unmistakable signs of exhaustion, the result is a book that sinks beneath a torrent of conjecture, fancy and mad mystical maundering.

Go with the flow

The Thames may now be the ‘cleanest metropolitan river in the world’, according to Ackroyd, but it has spent most of the last 1,000 years dealing with ceaseless tides of human effluent – including waste from a medieval ‘house of easement’ sited at the end of Friar Lane that contained as many as 128 seats. Calculating how long such sewage would take to work its way out of the river, Ackroyd points out that an oil drum dropped into the water at London Bridge would need anywhere between three and 11 weeks to make it to the open sea.

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websites:
The Thames: England’s River by Jonathan Schneer (Abacus £8.99) Engaging biography of the river

THAMES: Sacred River by Peter Ackroyd
Chatto £25 pp512
Buy the book here at the offer price of £xx (inc p&p)

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