Review by New York Times Review
CRAIG TAYLOR had a rough time when he first moved to London from Canada a dozen years ago. Someone tried to pick his friend's pocket. A scam artist took advantage of him. Wandering around with an ancient A-Z street atlas, he often felt "lonely, duped, underprepared, faceless, friendless." But something about the city got under his skin, so he resolved to push beyond his own experience and take its measure. Happily for us, the resuit is "Londoners," a rich and exuberant kaleidoscopic portrait of a great, messy, noisy, daunting, inspiring, maddening, enthralling, constantly shifting Rorschach test of a place, as befits the book's subtitle, "The Days and Nights of London Now -As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It, and Long for It." Here are subway workers and sex workers; homeless people and millionaires; enthusiasts and malcontents; immigrants and old-timers; the practical and the dreamy; people going and people coming. Taken as a whole, they send us some way toward addressing that slippery big-ticket question: What is London? How do you define a city so sprawling, so changeable, so varied? The answer, of course, is that there is no one answer. My London is as different from your London as you are different from me and that lady over there is different from both of us. And though countless excellent books have been written on the city, this is the one that best captures what it's like to live in London right now, through the words of the people themselves - just as Studs Terkel did for Chicago in his oral histories years ago. Taylor devoted five years to collecting the material for "Londoners." He gathered stories from all 32 boroughs, conducting formal interviews with more than 200 people, running through 300 tape-recorder batteries and taking down enough notes to generate transcripts of more than 950,000 words. Fewer than half the people he talked to made the final cut. Some interviews took months to set up and lasted just a few minutes. Others went on for hours. Very occasionally, glimpses of Taylor himself emerge, as when he stays up all night with a hyperenergetic trader at New Spitalfields Market, a delightful scene that reveals his gameness for the project. ("You feel all right? It'll start creeping up on you now," the trader says kindly at 6:40 am., as Taylor finally collapses into the delivery van. "Why don't you close your eyes, and I'll wake you up when we get there? Little 10 minutes, quarter of an hour will do you a world of good.") Anyone who conducts interviews for a living knows how hard it can sometimes be to get subjects to move past cant and cliché, to leave the platitudes and drive on to the good stuff. (How many articles feature people expressing "shock and sadness" at their neighbors' personal tragedies or noting that a murder victim "kept to himself"?) Londoners can be particularly tough nuts to crack. They may be talkative, but not to you, and there's hardly any of the sharing-with-strangers you find in, say, Dublin or even New York, where everyone has an opinion and, boy, do they want to express it. I picture Taylor as a good-natured, cheerful, friendly, patient, constantly engaging fellow. But whatever his demeanor - I'm only guessing - there's a great deal of art behind his book's apparent artlessness. Except for a few scene-setting paragraphs here and there, we barely hear from him. But the material he elicits proves his skill not only in asking questions that find the eloquence even in the naturally taciturn, but also in knowing the value of keeping offstage. "Londoners" is a master class in self-effacing journalism. In an age of celebrity interviewers and bombastic, self-loving television hosts, Taylor is the rare specimen who appears genuinely to believe that other people's words are more interesting than his own. Oral histories are only as good as the people in them, and this is as good an array as you could hope for. We hear from an artist who spent seven months gathering stray human hair from the Underground (apparently it blows around the tunnels like tumbleweed) and then used it to stuff a sculpture of his own head. "I liked the idea that I could have a little bit of everybody in London in something," he explains. "It was quite romantic and disgusting at the same time." We hear from a professional dominatrix who describes what happened when she made an appointment "to do some public humiliation out in Selfridge's," and notes that the French - there's a healthy French contingent in London these days - are her least favorite submissives. "They'll come up and grab you," she explains. "'Maîtresse!' Get your hands off me. They all think they're Gérard Depardieu." We hear from a young teacher in a tough school who says, "Apart from getting your phone stolen every 12 weeks, this is the best job ever"; from a lost-property clerk who describes the time two men came in looking for their swan ("I think they were hallucinating"); and from a registrar who conducts weddings and confesses that it's sometimes hard to keep a straight face during the readings. ("There's one, what is it, John Cooper Clarke, 'I wanna be your vacuum cleaner.'") In Taylor's patient and sympathetic hands, regular people become poets, philosophers, orators. "I think of London as a partner. I'm in love with London and always have been," says Peter Rees, a city planning officer. "London looks like a place that used to be something," says Davy Jones, a street photographer. "A stretch of water is as tangible as a building," says John Andrews, an urban angler. An airline pilot compares the planes circling over London's crowded skies to "bees around a honey pot." A refugee from Iran calls the city a place "where they give you two wings to go higher than other people." "Looking out across the Thames from Waterloo Bridge is like looking at a gemstone that's been sawn in half," says Dan Simon, a rickshaw driver. "All the lights sparkle." Taylor is the author of two previous books, one of which, "One Million Tiny Plays About Britain," began as a weekly series in The Guardian and consists entirely of little vignettes of overheard dialogue. If there's a person whose voice you long to hear more of, it's his, although of course this book isn't the place to do it. "I didn't want my experience of the city to be limited to one person, the first-person singular," he explains in his graceful introduction. What does London mean to him? It's complicated, he says, and his search for the truth (his London Chase, he calls it) has proved inconclusive. "London Chase - it's exhilarating, terrifying, surprising, reaffirming. It's tiring. It's neverending, and that figure you're chasing, out in the distance, out in the gray streets, always slips away." Sarah Lyall is a correspondent in the London bureau of The Times.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 4, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
A city as huge and diverse as the British capital is, by its very definition, many things to many people, and Taylor set out to discover all of the sides of London he possibly could. His task took him five years and hundreds of hours of tape as he interviewed approximately 200 Londoners from all walks of life. The manuscript was edited down to publishable size from its original 950,000 words, and a final 90 people are featured in the finished project. But certainly a wealth of information remains in this highly engaging oral history that bursts with charm, edification, and life. Lamenting in his preface that London is ungraspable, Taylor nevertheless, in venturing all over the city while avoiding what he calls official voices, gets a very firm handle on how human existence is marked by residence in that giant universe, appreciated by some and viewed through bleak lenses by others. Opening and closing pieces by commercial airline pilot Kevin Plover offer perfect bookends, for he writes first about coming in over London for landing and ends with flying out.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Playwright Taylor (A Million Tiny Plays About Britain) provides an ambitious, wide-ranging compilation of oral histories by the people who live, work, and, even quit the city, with a lively, unvarnished sense of the feelings the city inspires. In Studs Terkel fashion, Taylor tries to let the voices emerge with a distinctive timbre, revealing myriad backgrounds and motivations-an Iranian immigrant was smuggled in illegally by hiding in a lorry via Dover in 2007; a BBC woman recounts how she was hired to make the London Underground recordings ("Mind the gap" and so on); an accidental member of the Queen's Household Cavalry initially signed up only because he wanted to learn to drive; an old-timer from North London named Smartie depicts how gritty the city used to be in the late 1970s and '80s; some savvy market traders at New Spitalfields negotiate sales of fruits and vegetables in rhyming slang ("Tom Mix" means six); the ubiquitous taxi driver recounts taking the grueling Knowledge of London exam ("The Knowledge") among dozens of others. Taylor groups his accounts under general headings about what people do, such as "Keeping the Peace" (e.g., police officer, barrister) or "Gleaning on the Margins" (skipper, angler). Readers will be happy to see the map of the 32 boroughs. Although the work embarks initially on a depressing remembrance by "Former Londoner" Simon Kushner ("I suddenly realized that if I stayed in London, I'd be in exactly the same place in 10 or 20 years"), Taylor builds to true heights of civic virtue, as in Lost Property clerk Graig Clark's account of restoring lost objects to their owners, like umbrellas and a "slice of gateau." (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Fans of Studs Terkel's insightful oral histories will be delighted to discover a successor in British writer Taylor (One Million Tiny Plays About Britain). His collection of conversations with contemporary Londoners emerges from five years of work, an original total of 200 interviews, and more than 300 AAA batteries for his recorder. The end result is a perspective on London as diverse and fascinating as its denizens. This is the kind of book one can dip into at leisure. Divided into sections such as "Arriving," "Earning One's Keep," and "Feeding the City," the book features conversations with a dominatrix who declares, "London is one of the kinkier cities in the world"; a nurse who discusses the seasonal nature of treatments required in her clinic; a "skipper," whom U.S. readers would call a dumpster diver; and a rickshaw driver who comments on the often sleazy side of Soho. VERDICT More than a collection of conversations, this book brings London to life as it is-ever changing, ever eternal, ever unforgettable. A delight! With the 2012 Olympics coming up in London, this should be a popular purchase. [See Prepub Alert, 8/22/11.]-Janet Ross, formerly with Sparks Branch Lib., NV (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
One Million Tiny Plays About Britain, 2009, etc.) is clearly fascinated and fond of the place and those who manage to thrive there, even if he is still mystified by who is and isn't a "Londoner." With 32 boroughs (New York only has five), London is truly a city of villages and takes its postcodes very seriously. Cleverly, Taylor organizes his masses of voices by "people who worked with the stuff of the city." His subjects include a male nurse; a street photographer; a nightclub door attendant; a manicurist who offers her singularly wise take on the strata of society; a personal trainer who tries to smarten up his clients but finds the shoulders and the alignment give out immediately; the black actress who got tired of being cast as a slave and now plies her trade as a plumber; a beekeeper atop the Royal Festival Hall; a gay man who depicts the best cruising spots; the female voice of the London Underground who reveals that even the officials couldn't decide how to pronounce the stop "Marylebone." From the well-heeled Pakistani currency trader near his office across from Bank station to the transsexual "skipper" ("forager for waste food in the skips") on the streets in South London, the stories are alternately poignant, uplifting, amusing and sad. A nicely polished oral history--good reading just for the vicarious kicks.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
