Department of English and American Studies English

Home , Penelope Lively, Saturday (novel)

Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Anna Štangelová

Depiction of London in Contemporary British Novel: Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Penelope Lively’s City of the Mind Bachelor’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: prof. Mgr., Milada Franková, CSc., M.A. 2017

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

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Acknowledgment

I would like to thank my supervisor, prof. Mgr., Milada Franková, CSc., M.A. for her guidance, professional advice and kind encouragement. I would also like to thank my partner and my family who supported me during the writing of this thesis.

Table of Contents

Introduction ...... 1

1. Depiction of London in Literature ...... 3

2. Ian Mc Ewan and Penelope Lively – Brief Introduction ...... 6

2.1. Saturday and City of the Mind – Introduction ...... 6

3. Upper-Middle-Class Fitzrovia in Ian McEwan’s Saturday ...... 7

3.1. Under the Tower: History and Characteristics of Fitzrovia ...... 7

3.2. Henry Perowne’s London ...... 9

4. The Docklands: The New Face of London in Penelope Lively’s City of the Mind .. 18

4.1. Industrial Architecture: Metamorphosis in Construction ...... 18

4.2. Matthew and his Philosophical View of the City and Time ...... 20

Conclusion ...... 30

Appendix ...... 32

Bibliography ...... 33

English Resume ...... 35

Czech Resume ...... 35

Introduction

The thesis aims to compare two different approaches of depicting a city in a contemporary British novel. The novels compared are Ian McEwan’s Saturday and

Penelope Lively’s City of the Mind. In both novels, London is viewed by the protagonists as an inseparable part of their lives and is extensively described by them.

The city itself is, in both novels, a key element and – to a certain level – a separate character. It determines the lives of the protagonists and shapes their minds as well.

In Saturday, the main character Henry Perowne experiences one day in his not very extraordinary life. Perowne concentrates his activities in one particular quarter in the centre of the city, Fitzrovia. Inhabited mostly by the upper-middle class, it is a calm, pleasant place to live, and it bears a certain stillness in its mood. Perowne loves the city and realizes how extensively the city itself shapes his own life. He constantly observes the city and describes the space with profound admiration.

On the contrary, Matthew Halland, the main protagonist of City of the Mind, perceives London in the run of time. He, being an architect, inevitably notices the latest changes that the city undergoes literally in every minute. It is in a constant state of flux and Halland contributes to this dynamism by working on a building in Docklands, the area in South London that went through major development during the 90ʼs with the project “London Docklands Development Corporation”.

The core of the thesis is, therefore, a comparative analysis of the two separate entities as depicted in both novels. The frame of the compared is not particularly defined, as both Perowne and Halland live in and concentrate on different quarters of

London. The key element of the comparison is the difference of the literary depiction of those quarters, as well as the impact of the city on the life of an individual.

The necessity of processing this topic lies, on the one hand, in the tradition of capturing the spatiality in literature, on the other hand in the particular aims of the two novelists. They both depict London very intensely, but in their own distinct voices. The literary depiction, or even materialization, of particular places in literature has been around ever since. One of the key questions of the thesis is how the two novelists approach the topic and in what ways their attitude towards the topic differ.

The thesis starts with a brief introduction to the authorsʼ literary output. Both

Lively and McEwan have great achievement in the field of literature and an overview of their previous works is necessary to understand the two compared novels. McEwan is certainly considering the topic of spatiality more often than Lively: as Petr Chalupský in his book The Postmodern City of Dreadful Night states, “McEwan is not an exclusively urban writer yet the urban environment frequently occurs in his works” (80).

Nevertheless, Lively’s approach to this topic is unique in putting into consideration not only the place, but mixing it with the notion of time.

The thesis also gives a brief overview of how the urban landscape is depicted in literature. Based on the works of Petr Chalupský and Richard Lehan, the first section of the thesis offers an insight to the problem of urban landscapes in literature.

To help the reader locate the points of interest analysed in the thesis I also include an Appendix with two maps of London where the locations of Fitzrovia and the

Docklands are marked.

1. Depiction of London in Literature

When it comes to the depiction of a city in literature, this topic has been around ever since. Setting a fictional story to a place that exists in reality is a popular and often- used scheme; however, the level of accuracy of the depiction of the places in literary works range from almost realistic to completely fictional. In Saturday as well as in City of the Mind the reader is acquainted with a very truthful depiction of London. To support some of the ideas presented in the core of the thesis it is necessary to bring up some theoretical works of scholars who, in their works, deal with the topic of urbanism in literature. Thus, this part of the thesis is focused on the theory of urbanism in literature and is largely based on the works of Richard Lehan and Petr Chalupský.

London, being a metropolis of great significance for the Western world, is undoubtedly a very popular object of depiction and was displayed in numerous pieces of art. As Petr Chalupský claims in his study of Peter Ackroyd’s London Novels, “the metropolis has been one of the most common and popular objects of imaginative representation, celebratory as well as condemnatory, literature being no exception” (12).

The origin of this approach is, according to Richard Lehan, in the time of the

Enlightenment. In his book The City in Literature he says that urbanism is a product of the Enlightenment. In the book he explores “the ways the city has been conceptualized from its origin to the present time” (3).

Lehan examines urbanism in literature from a very wide point of view and concentrates mostly on the Enlightenment and Modernism, but he offers an interesting point of view on the city as a state of mind, a concept that is used in Lively’s City of the

Mind. Lehan thinks that the postindustrial city, which he connects with postmodernism, is largely affected by the movement of international capital and by establishing

3 multinational corporations. According to him, “urban activity becomes more abstract and ‘unreal’ as power operates from hidden sources. Such a city is at once a psychical reality and a state of mind: to read the city is to read an urbanized self, to know the city from within” (287). It follows that the character of the story identifies with the object, in this case the city that surrounds him, and that inevitably influences his self-perception.

Chalupský presents another interesting and relevant point when he says that the vastness of the urban structure causes an insecurity in the inhabitants, because it is impossible to fully understand the complexity of the city. He describes London as too big for an individual to grasp it fully. “Any city as big and diverse as London is too vast, chaotic, volatile and incoherent for its inhabitants to ever understand and know it in its totality” (12). This leads us to the fact that there is a wide range of possibilities of how to capture the specific genius loci of the city, in this case London. Chalupský adds that “London’s heterogeneity is inevitably reflected in the diversity of literary devices – genres, styles and modes of expression – inspired or instigated by the city, which attempt to capture as many of its aspects and metamorphoses as possible” (13), suggesting the possibilities an author has when he decides to implement the city in his writing.

In his other book, The Postmodern City of Dreadful Night, Chalupský touches upon the connection between the urbanism in literature and the two movements that largely defined the literature of the present days: modernism and postmodernism. The aim of the thesis is neither to further elaborate on the two literary movements, nor to trace back the beginnings of the tradition of the presence of the cities in literature, however it is worth mentioning Chalupský’s point of view on the origin of urbanism as the theme in literature: “I am convinced that the reasons and causes behind the city being depicted in contemporary British literature may never be credibly discussed

4 without tracing them back in the literary tradition up to at least before the rise of the modernist movement” (11). Chalupský’s opinion suggests that further analysis of the history of the topic would help to understand its development better.

Lehan in the Epilogue of his book further elaborates on the clash between the reality and the image of a city in literature:

“Textualizing the city creates its own reality, becomes a way of seeing

the city – but such textuality cannot substitute for the pavements and buildings,

for the physical city. Before the city is a construct, literary or cultural, it is a

physical reality with a dynamics of its own, even as that dynamics becomes

difficult to assess. The most convincing constructs are those that confirm our

sense of reality, validate experience, and suggest coherence in the face of

chaos.” (291)

In this excerpt Lehan points out that the portrait of the city the reader is acquainted with is a construct based on reality; nevertheless, it is crucial whether the reader can identify with the construct (with the foundations of his previous knowledge) or not. The reader also has to bear in mind that the portrait is always subjective. This is a notion one has to be cognizant of especially when looking at Lively’s portrait of London, as her depiction is largely dependent on the time frame of the story.

2. Ian Mc Ewan and Penelope Lively – Brief Introduction

Ian McEwan is with no doubt a respected, well-known and best-selling English novelist. Born in 1948, he began his writing career with ghostly short stories and so far published 14 novels; one of them (Amsterdam, 1998) brought him the Man Booker

Prize. In his literary works, he often concentrates on depicting complicated sides of the human mind which puts in contrast with the protagonists’ day-to-day environment. In his narratives he works with more serious and broad topics and puts them in contrast with an individual’s destiny.

On the other hand, Penelope Lively’s writing is largely concentrated on an individual leaving him his own space for decisions. Born in 1933, she is also a winner of the Man Booker Prize which she received for the novel Moon Tiger (1987). Having written more than 20 novels, she is also a respected author of numerous books for children.

2.1 Saturday and City of the Mind - Introduction

What connects Saturday (first published in 2003) and City of the Mind (first published in 1991) is the primary set-up: in both novels the reader meets an intelligent, well-educated, upper-middle class white man in his middle age, working in an independent, well-paid job. Both protagonists can be described as introverted and thoughtful; they often lose themselves in contemplating their lives, the lives of their loved ones and their surroundings. One of them has a functional family, one of them had it, but has lost it after divorce.

Saturday takes place almost exclusively in Fitzrovia, whereas City of the Mind covers more areas, but is mostly focused on the Docklands – in the time of the novel a fast-developing brownfield in the south of London.

3. Upper-Middle-Class Fitzrovia in Ian McEwan’s Saturday

To start with the first of the selected novels, Saturday offers an insight into the life of London’s upper-middle class of present days. The main protagonist, Henry

Perowne, is a neurosurgeon whose life can be characterised as peaceful, stable and without excesses. He and his family live in a house in Fitzrovia, a district in the heart of

London that stands out for its calm and balanced environment. Perowne is a thoughtful and perceptive man who likes to ponder on things that surround him. He loves his job, his family and the place he lives in. His stereotypical life is, in one day, disrupted by sudden unfortunate events during which the integrity of his and his loved one’s lives is threatened.

The novel is special for its concept of depicting only one specific day in the life of Henry Perowne. In the past, many authors used this concept to capture an accurate insight into the life of an individual; one of the most striking examples is Virginia

Woolf’s classic modernist novel Mrs Dalloway. This specific time frame helps to evoke accuracy and brings urgency to the flow of the story. As Michael L. Ross states in his paper “On a Darkling Planet: Ian McEwan’s Saturday and the Condition of England,” the “narrative chronology has been compressed into an exiguous 24 hours” (82), suggesting the pressing feeling this particular strategy immediately creates.

3.1 Under the Tower: History and Characteristics of Fitzrovia

As the novel takes place almost exclusively in Fitzrovia, it is necessary to briefly present this specific London neighbourhood. Fitzrovia is a district very near to the

7 centre of the city that lies about one mile north of Trafalgar Square. Robert Adam,

Scottish neoclassical architect who developed his own “Adam style” and had a huge influence on the architecture of London, is the one who gave Fitzrovia its specific look.

The quarter is characteristic of neoclassical terrace houses built in the 18th century for the upper classes but later on inhabited by diverse groups of immigrants mostly from

Germany and France.

The main dominant of the quarter which is often being referred to in the novel is the BT Tower, formerly known as the Post Office Tower. Built in the 60’s, the tower used to be the tallest building in London up to 1980. (hidden-london.com) In Saturday

McEwan, talking through his character, offers a delicate description of the tower: “It rises above the plane trees in the central gardens, behind the reconstructed façade on the southern side; set high on the glass-paned stalk, six stacked circular terraces bearing their giant dishes, and above them, a set of fat wheels or sleeves within which is bound the geometry of fluorescent lights. At night, the dancing Mercury is a playful touch.”

What is meant by ‘the dancing Mercury’ is the old logo of British Telecom, a company after which the tower is named nowadays.

As many other parts of London, Fitzrovia too has its famous artistic history: in the 1930’s a group of writers, including Dylan Thomas, the famous Welsh poet, used to gather in the Fitzroy Tavern on Charlotte Street. This group of intellectuals is said to give the quarter its name. (fitzrovia.org.uk) Despite being a vibrant and fancy part of the city that offers many opportunities and cosy places to eat, drink and be entertained, it can still be characterised as noble with calm and peaceful environment. Nevertheless, the quarter also has its shadowy, or at least neglected, parts that will be mentioned later.

3.2 Henry Perowne’s London

To begin with the literary analysis of Perowne’s London, it is best to briefly summarise the main dramatic plot of the novel. After a rather contemplative morning,

Perowne’s ordinary Saturday is thrown into disarray on his way to squash. As a demonstration is underway, he is forced to take another route and accidentally crashes into a car that belongs to Baxter, a man suffering from Huntington’s disease. Baxter, accompanied by his two pals, behaves aggressively and poses a threat to Perowne who gets out of the critical situation by recognising Baxter’s medical condition and pretending that he, as a doctor, can help him. After the incident, followed by an unsatisfactory game of squash with his colleague Jay Strauss, he visits his mother in a nursing home. Then he goes to a club to see his musical son’s gig. Later when he returns home, he cooks dinner for his family: his daughter is returning from a year-long study trip and his father-in-law is joining the family as well. Finally, after the whole family gathers, Baxter and his accomplice, who were following Perowne, violently enter the house and menace the family with knives and guns. Baxter forces Perowne’s daughter Daisy to take off her clothes and threatens her with rape, inadvertently causing a revelation of her early stage of pregnancy. After that, Baxter is knocked down by

Perowne and his son Theo; the surgeon’s defence causes him a head injury. The book closes up with Perowne performing brain surgery on Baxter and thus saving his life.

It can be said about the book that it can serve as a brilliant introduction into a life of a Londoner; in a sense, in the amount and precision of the details it is better than a guidebook for those who want to experience the lifestyle of London’s upper-middle- class. Sometimes McEwan is so obsessed with details the reader is tempted to take a map and follow Perowne’s steps from one specific location to another. Let’s illustrate

McEwan’s descriptive style by two excerpts from the book:

Most weeks he still runs in Regent’s Park, through William Nesfield's restored gardens, past the Lion Tazza to Primrose Hill and back. (21)

He can hear the first stirring of steady traffic on the Euston Road, like a breeze moving through a forest of firs. (38)

In both cases McEwan describes details from Perowne’s life, although these examples can relate to many other Londoners’ day-to-day experience (Regent’s Park is a popular place for leisure running and Euston Road is almost every day blocked with cars).

What is especially interesting about McEwan’s style of writing is that he also inserts references to real historical events that have happened in the city. When he needs to refer to a specific moment in Perowne’s life, he relates it to a real incident: “On a rare day off he was two games up against Joy Strauss when they were called – it was the

Paddington rail crash, everyone was called” (21). McEwan refers to a tragic rail accident that occurred on the 5th of October 1999 which was fatal to 31 passengers.

This is not the only example of blending reality and fiction by which the author creates a sense of truthfulness throughout the novel.

Another example of this technique is present in an episode from the life of

Perowne’s mother Lily. During her youth she concentrated on her promising career of a professional swimmer. When Perowne thinks of her past, he remembers that “on

Sunday morning, September the third 1939, while Chamberlain was announcing in his radio broadcast from Downing Street that the country was at war with Germany, the fourteen-year-old Lily was at a municipal pool near Wembley, having her first lesson with a sixty-year-old international athlete who had swum for Britain in the Stockholm

Olympics in 1912 – the first ever women’s swimming event.” (156) Same as in the previous excerpt, the author uses a major historical event (in this case the involvement

10 of the United Kingdom in World War II), to illustrate a seemingly unimportant episode in the life of an individual.

At the beginning of Perowne’s day, he is a witness to an accident that heralds the following hapless incidents of the day and that brings up one of the main motifs of the novel: terrorism, war in Iraq and American intervention in the conflict. Immediately after he wakes up, he looks from his window and in the sky he notices a bright fast- moving object; at first he thinks it is a comet, but subsequently he identifies a burning plane falling down in the direction of Heathrow, one of London’s city airports. This morning incident establishes what will be discussed in the novel as a defining and pressing topic of current days. Further on, Perowne is affected by an anti-war demonstration that takes place in London and later indirectly causes his troubles.

The very opening of the book is an ode to the city itself. As Perowne watches the city from his window during his early-morning start of the day, he comments on what he sees in a sense of admiration, overwhelmed by the structure’s possibilities.

Standing here, as immune to the cold as a marble statue, gazing towards

Charlotte Street, towards a foreshortened jumble of façades, scaffolding and

pitched roofs, Henry thinks the city is a success, a brilliant invention, a

biological masterpiece – millions teeming around the accumulated and layered

achievements of the centuries, as though around a coral reef, sleeping, working,

entertaining themselves, harmonious for the most part, nearly everyone wanting

it to work. And the Perownes’ own corner, a triumph of congruent proportion;

the perfect square laid out by Robert Adam enclosing a perfect circle of garden –

an eighteenth-century dream bathed and embraced by modernity, by street light

from above, and from below by fibre-optic cables, and cool fresh water coursing

down pipes, and sewage borne away in an instant of forgetting (5).

With his common historical knowledge, Perowne connects to the architecture of

Fitzrovia and appreciates its balance and harmony. He perceives the city almost as a living organism that functions on its own and sustains stable. He also lays in contrasts the eighteenth-century visionaries (in this example the previously mentioned architect

Robert Adam) with how their inventions developed to perfection.

From the first pages of the novel the importance of the environment, in this case a cosmopolitan city, is eminent. Perowne himself, despite the fact he is not so literate as his daughter Daisy, continually reflects upon the city and its history. He reminds the reader of the past times and historical development when he thinks of the façades he sees from his window: “That particular façade is a reconstruction, a pastiche – wartime

Fitzrovia took some hits from the Luftwaffe” (4) and puts the modern development in contrast by mentioning the famous tall dominant: “and right behind is the Post Office

Tower, municipal and seedy by day, but at night, half-concealed and decently illuminated, a valiant memorial to the optimistic days” (4). For him the tower is a symbol of progress and an indicator of the wealth of the country after World War II.

Perowne spends a substantial part of his morning by observing the Fitzroy

Square. He sees miniatures of life, fragments of other people’s realities, “gazing through the bedroom window” (66). He thinks of the square as of a theatre stage and notices little things from people’s lives, playing detective, deducting why those “actors” are there and what is happening to them. As Chung-jen Chen states in his essay “London is

‘Waiting for Its Bomb,’” it is commonly agreed among literary critics that McEwan

“consistently shows a blend of the personal with the public” (127). In a sense, Perowne

12 is a voyeur of other people’s destinies. This illustrates how the small personal dramas can be affecting the city and its inhabitants which of course applies to both sides.

“People often drift into a square to act out their dramas. Clearly, a street won’t do.

Passion needs room, the attentive spaciousness of a theatre” (60). What is interesting about this thought is that for Perowne, being a surgeon, a theatre is both the square he watches and the operation room he works in and he knows like the back of his hand. He contrasts the effect of the large free space with the false sense of intimacy it brings to the “theatre protagonists” when he claims that “the square’s public aspect grants privacy to these intimate dramas” (61) while he’s watching the scene.

In one of the cases, the protagonists are a teenage couple having an argument during which the boy is soothing a crying girl. At first he thinks the girl, who loosely resembles his daughter Daisy, is concerned because of the pair’s love affair, but his medical knowledge enables him to recognise that they are most probably drug addicts – he analyses her scratching of her back as a possible histamine reaction. He assumes that

“a missed score rather than a family matter is behind her distress and the boy’s futile comforting” (60). This observation leads us to the troubled life of London’s lower class that McEwan firstly presents only in similar slight hints, but what later on affects

Perowne more than he would expect.

This moves us to the next pressing topic: multiculturalism. London, as many other large cities of the 21st century, is apart from other things heavily multicultural.

There is one side to this topic McEwan naturally can not omit and that is being prejudiced towards the immigrants. This topic is materialised in the story of Perowne’s patient Andrea, young Nigerian girl, who came to London at the age of twelve and went to live in Brixton, an infamous Afro-American London quarter, with her relatives. The other, seamier side to this element of multicultural societies is brought up when

Perowne describes her faith: “Something in her that village life in rural north Nigeria kept buttoned down was released once she started at her local Brixton comprehensive.

She took to the music, the clothes, the talk, the values – the street. . . . (she) took drugs, got drunk, shoplifted, bunked off school, hated authority, and ‘swore like a merchant seaman’” (10). On this example McEwan shows from a different point of view how troubling joining a specific part of society can be for an individual and how powerful the environment can be in shaping a young innocent woman.

What, in a sense, connects Andrea’s story and the story of Baxter is another issue cities have to deal with – the clash between the wealthy and the poor, the social conditions of those who weren’t so lucky as Perowne and his family in the access to opportunities and financial security. As Ross states in his essay, illustrating it on the types of cars the two protagonists ride (Perowne’s luxurious, classy Mercedes versus

Baxter’s shabby, manly, ‘continental’ BMW), there is an “anti-idyllic dissonance ingrained in the fabric of contemporary London life” (85). He points out that in the conflict Baxter later in the novel provokes there is a hidden message bringing up the question of social injustice and frustration of the lower classes.

Which brings us to the other side of being successful in a city. In the morning,

Perowne also thinks of another aspect of the city life: a hectic lifestyle. Perowne, his wife Rosalind (an attorney in a newspaper) as well as the majority of professionals living in big cities nowadays are excessively hard-working; they leave little time for themselves (at least during the weekdays) and from time to time even let their jobs overtake their lives. Perowne and Rosalind joke that sometimes, when they want to make love, they must get “snatched . . . from the jaws of work” (23). As Perowne puts it with a slight resignation, “in ambitious middle life it sometimes seems there is only work” (23).

The frenetic style of living undeniably affects the inhabitants’ body clock as well as their sleeping habits. After he watches the burning plane falling down the sky, he thinks about the process of sleeping or rather, not sleeping: “But a city of its nature cultivates insomniacs; it is itself a sleepless entity whose wires never stop singing; among so many millions there are bound to be people staring out of windows when normally they would be asleep. And not the same people every night” (17). This implies that people living in a city are constantly in motion and the mass of bodies and souls heavily fluctuates. This fact poses a question of how is a single individual important to a structure so complex as a metropolis.

McEwan, surprisingly, does not have a simple answer to this question.

Nevertheless, Perowne often feels the pressure and the impact public problems have on him and the unavoidability of noticing the events sometimes bothers him. When he is in the middle of the squash game, which he considers an opportunity for him to relax and rest his mind, he notices a reflection of a silent TV in a mirror. In the TV he sees the latest news on the plane crash and he expresses discontent about it: “Isn’t it possible to enjoy an hour’s recreation without this invasion, this infection from the public domain?

He begins to see the matter resolving in simple terms: winning his game will be an assertion of his privacy. He has a right now and then – everyone has it – not to be disturbed by world events, or even streets events” (108). Perowne feels stressed after the incident with Baxter, he wants to enjoy his game without being disturbed by, however important, events that take place around him and break his concentration.

As it was mentioned before, the anti-war demonstration is what disrupts the course of Perowne’s ordinary Saturday. He first notices it (right after the episode with the young drug abusers) when he spots a gathering on the other side of Fitzroy Square.

This event is based on a real demonstration that took place on the 15th of February 2003

15 and is claimed to be the largest protest event in human history. That day anti-war protests took place not only in London but also in many other cities worldwide. It is thought that in London there were at least 250 000 marchers and around a million attendees in total. (wikipedia.org)

When Perowne describes the demonstration and its attendees, he tends to look down on them, but his thoughts are riven to, on the one hand, a certain sympathy towards the act and, on the other hand, to being sceptical of the purpose of such action:

On Warren Street he turns right. Now his view is east, towards the

Tottenham Court Road. Here’s an even bigger crowd, swelled by hundreds

disgorging from the tube station. Backlit by the low sun, silhouetted figures

break away and merge into a darker mass. . . . Despite his scepticism, Perowne .

. . feels the seduction and excitement peculiar to such events; a crowd possessing

the streets, tens of thousands of strangers converging with a single purpose

conveying an intimation of revolutionary joy. (72)

Perowne often gets back to the demonstration in his thoughts which, as Chung- jen indicates, “(creates) in him a delicate sense of the union of fates: as the story develops, the fate of Perowne and his family is changed by people he has never before seen in his life” (129). In Saturday nothing is a mere coincidence, every little (however unnoticeable at first sight) action has its consequence. Chung-jen continues in developing his thought on the clash of the inner and the outer space, saying that there is a “sense of concurrence evoked across boundaries between the private and the public”

(129). The impact the anonymous city and its inhabitants have at a person’s life is eminent.

Subsequently, after Perowne passes the demonstration, he is again lost in his thoughts as he is driving through the city. He praises the city for its sustainability:

The street is fine, and the city, grand achievement of the living and all

the dead who’ve ever lived here, is fine too, and robust. It won’t easily allow

itself to be destroyed. It’s too good to let go. . . . the future will look back on us

as gods, certainly in this city, lucky gods blessed by supermarket cornucopias,

torrents of accessible information, warm clothes that weigh nothing, extended

lifespans, wondrous machines. (77)

Perowne, in this quotation, expresses gratitude towards the city and the civilisation in general. He is aware of the fact that he himself is among the priviliged, but that doesn’t stop him from praising the city for the opportunities it offers for its inhabitants.

Apparently, in Saturday there are many images of the city of London; some related to the plot of the novel, some relevant to the image of the city in general. The novel is, among other things, a tribute to London. How to better close this chapter of the thesis than with a quotation that shows Perowne’s loving attitude towards the city?

He’s where Goodge and Charlotte Streets meet – a spot he’s always

liked, where the affairs of utility and pleasure condense to make colour and

space brighter: mirrors, flowers, soaps, newspapers, electrical plugs, house

paints, key cutting urbanely interleaved with expensive restaurants, wine and

tapas bars, hotels. Who was the American novelist who said a man could be

happy living on Charlotte Street? (122-3)

4. The Docklands: The New Face of London in Penelope Lively’s City of the Mind

In City of the Mind, a different approach to the depiction of the urban landscape is presented. While in Saturday the reader experiences one day in the life of the main protagonist, in Lively’s novel the plot covers longer period of approximately one year.

Matthew Halland is an architect who observes various locations in London and comments on them in his soliloquies. As it will be stressed out further in the thesis, what is at his forefront is not only the description of the places but also the setting in a specific time frame.

In his book Chalupský characterises the picture of London in City of the Mind as vital and sustainable: “It is a city which, despite all its decay and destructive forces, manages to rise again, partly intact, partly changed, yet always strong enough to preserve its vitality” (164). He also stresses out the importance of the notion of time, because “Lively’s London is based on a coexistence of various forms of time where the past, present and future perpetually collide and mingle” (164). And further on, when he claims that “City of the Mind thoroughly examines the various impacts of London on the mind of one of its sensitive walkers” (164), he comments on the impact the city has on a personality of an individual. All these elements Chalupský deals with will be examined later in the thesis in the analysis of the novel.

4.1 Industrial Architecture: Metamorphosis in Construction

The area of interest in City of the Mind is eminently different to what we see in

Saturday: the Docklands, an industrial area in the south east of London, is a place that in the time of the novel was in a process of significant changes. As the name itself

18 suggests, the place has been important for the city due to the tradition of docks and ports in the location. Located at the river Thames’ banks, the area has been used as a transfer hub of imported goods for centuries. In the end of the 17th century, a first dock has been built there, which defined the area’s looks and usage until the present days. What is nowadays meant by the Docklands is a large place spreading across the Isle of Dogs,

Surrey Quays and the Royals.

The area has long and difficult history that takes us back to the era of colonization during which a Port of London was based there, formerly the world’s largest port (eastlondonhistory.co.uk). In the 1970’s the docks were closed down and the area lost its source of prosperity; in the 1980’s the government lead by the prime minister Margaret Thatcher came up with a plan to restore the locality. The London

Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) was established to completely rebuilt and renovate the industrial locality so that it can be used for commercial and housing purposes. From the beginning, the project was controversial and criticised for concentrating on building luxury apartments and top-class offices rather than helping to provide decent housing for working classes (who traditionally resided in the area). The restoration has been largely driven by the demands of the developers who weren’t very motivated to express respect towards the neighbourhood and its inhabitants. (Butler

760) Nevertheless, thanks to the restoration that was completed in the beginning of the

1990’s the area now strives and is a wealthy and representative district of London.

What became the symbol of the Docklands is the Canary Wharf office complex, a set of tall office buildings made of steel and glass, that soon after its completion became the second financial centre of London (after the City of London, a central business district with the famous Gherkin skyscraper). Also, the second tallest building in the United Kingdom called “One Canada Square” is located there.

In the beginning of City of the Mind, Matthew characterises the area in his own words: “(Matthew and his colleague) are entering Docklands, the land of promise, the city of the new decade, of the new century. It is a landscape of simultaneous decay and resurrection; glass, steel and concrete rear from the mud and rubble of excavation” (12-

13).

In the novel the location of Blackwall is often mentioned, thus it is necessary to clarify that Blackwall is a small part of the Docklands located on the north-east corner of the Isle of Dogs peninsula. Blackwall is the place where Matthew’s newest project is being built during the novel.

4.2 Matthew and his Philosophic View of the City and Time

The plot of the novel is significantly less adventurous than the one in Saturday.

As Mary Hurley Moran states in her essay, what is important in the novel is not the dramatic plot itself, but the city as a separate character: “Although the novel does have a protagonist and a plot – respectively, fortyish architect Matthew Halland and the developments in his personal and professional lives – its true subject is the setting: the city of London” (112).

Although the plot itself is of low importance for the aims of this thesis, it is necessary to briefly summarise it for further examination of the novel. In the novel the reader meets Matthew Halland, an architect in his forties and a partner of an architectural firm of James Gamlin and Partners. He is, more or less, a solitary figure, partly because of his nature, partly due to a recent divorce with which he hasn’t yet completely come to terms. He has a daughter, Jane, whom he loves profoundly and of whom he takes care during weekends. Matthew is working on a massive project in the

Docklands (the Blackwall project) which consumes most of his time as well as his thoughts. He, being an architect, often reflects upon the places that surround him, and in his train of thoughts he comments on the places using his wide knowledge and architectonical background.

What do Matthew and Perowne have in common is that it can be said about them that they lead rather ordinary (upper) middle class life. Nevertheless, there are few events that disrupt Matthew’s calm way of life throughout the novel. He randomly meets a girl in a café with whom he, in the very end of the novel (after many rigmaroles and mishaps) starts a new romantic relationship. He is also confronted with (and later threatened by) Rutter, an éminence grise who firstly offers a peculiar job to Matthew and who, after he is rejected, stands behind various unpleasant attacks on Matthew such as smashing the windscreen of his car or sending a dead rat in a box to the architectural firm’s address. The novel ends in a conciliatory manner after the Blackwall project is finished; in the very end of the story Matthew finally realises he is in love again, which for him is a feeling that he never expected to experience again.

The mood of the novel is largely introspective and Matthew is a very thoughtful, literate man. As it was mentioned before, the narrative of the novel isn’t nearly as important as the soliloquies in the mind of the central character, who is repeatedly commenting on London throughout the novel, making the city the true main protagonist of the book.

One of the significant dissimilarity between the two novels is that Lively does not refer to specific places that really exist such as McEwan, but builds up fictional places that are set in real locations. This approach is, naturally, less based in reality than the one of McEwan’s, but it by no means lowers the credibility of the depiction of the

21 city. For example, it can be said that Matthew is building one of the large office towers somewhere near the Canary Wharf, although it is not specified which one it should be exactly or whether Lively had one particular building in mind while writing the novel.

Another example of this approach can be found in the case of Jobson, Matthew’s colleague, who is working on a renovation of an old house in a place called Cobham

Square. A square of this name cannot be found in London, but according to the description of the place it can be said the location must be somewhere in one of the old, traditional quarters of the city. It is up to the reader where exactly does he locate the place, for example Anita Brookner in her review of City of The Mind suggests the house might be in Bloomsbury (archive.spectator.co.uk). It is also good to point out that the architectural firm resides in a renovated warehouse in Finsbury. These, among others, are examples of using real locations in the narrative of the novel.

What Saturday and City of the Mind certainly have in common is the nature of the two protagonists. Both in their middle age, successful and renowned in their professions, their personalities are akin; they are both of perspicacious and introverted character.

Matthew, just as Perowne, often contemplates about the city and its development. What is different in Matthew’s view of the environment is that he perceives the city in the run of time: he, endowed with the knowledge of a professional architect, comments on how the history blends with the present. Matthew even, in some parts of the novel, finds himself dreaming about different times of the city’s history and visualises the destinies of its inhabitants. Matthew’s continual connection to history is apparent in many passages of the novel, for example when he moves through London with Alice, a woman he is occasionally seeing: “The whole place is one babble of allusions, all chronology subsumed into the distortions and mutations of today, so that in the end what is visible and what is uttered are complementary. The jumbled brick and stone of the city’s

22 landscape is a medley of style in which centuries and decades rub shoulders in a disorder that denies the sequence of time” (66).

The aspect of time and the fleetingness of things can be seen in another quotation of Matthew’s train of thoughts:

We see the city stratified. Decked out according to the times, furnished

with costumed figures, with sedan chairs or hansom cabs. A chronology, a

sequence.

Whereas the city itself, of course, is without such constrictions. It streams

away into the past; it is now, then and tomorrow. It is as anarchic as the eye of a

child, without expectation or assumption. It is we who are tethered to

circumstance, not the world we inhabit. (76)

Where Matthew sees the elusiveness of the present time, he also senses the immeasurable past behind it. He is always aware of the fact that nothing that surrounds him would not be there if someone else hadn’t put it there. Bringing up the element of time into the way how one can perceive the public space is a perfect example of how Lively’s and

McEwan’s courses of thought are different.

As it has been said, what occupies Matthew during the novel is the Blackwall project, named after the locality of the emerging building. The building is about to become the landmark of the area. Matthew realises its importance and understands the opportunity it has for him and the architectural firm because it will not only bring prestige to the firm but also money and international reputation. It is the first time the firm works on such a large project, but he and his colleagues do not seem to fully fall in with it. The decision to take this project was, for the firm, “sensibly pragmatic” (5).

Their slightly reserved attitude towards the project can be seen in the comments his

23 colleagues make; they are all sceptical towards the significance of the building itself.

When Matthew and one of his colleagues, Tony Brace, ride to the location of the project, Tony comments on it with a sense of disbelief: “‘If you ask me,’ said Tony

Brace, ‘this whole thing is a bubble that will burst. Docklands. I can see it empty in ten years’ time’” (17). Tony implies that the whole reconstruction project is nothing but a temporary business for the developers and it has no value for the city and its inhabitants whatsoever.

Another Matthew’s colleague, Jobson, calls the Docklands: “The never-never land” (25). He is comparing the Blackwall project with Tony Brace’s project of renovating a 19th century school building that will become a restaurant and a wine bar.

As they are discussing the differences in their current professional occupations, they agree on their ambivalent attitude towards the development in the Docklands. When comparing the Docklands to his project, Jobson comments on it with disdain: “Well, what we're putting up now will see out the next hundred years. More than I can say for your glasshouses down in Docklands” (25). Matthew vaguely agrees with his colleagues’ objections but feels reconciled with what he has to do to make a living.

Matthew often mentions the raw materials buildings are composed of.

References to bricks, glass, concrete, clay, Coade stone – a ceramic material also known as “artificial stone” used mainly on Neoclassical buildings for decorations – etc. are very often present in his comments on the city (nationaltrust.org.uk). When he looks at the building his colleague renovates, he is contemplating the substance the house is built of (in this case a brick) and of the meaning of the architecture itself:

This is a pile of bricks. Carefully arranged bricks, I grant you, but a pile of

bricks none the less. You may call it a late Georgian house with a neo-classical

portico and Coade stone dressings. Others might just call it a house. A Martian

would call it a pile of bricks, if he had got as far as identifying a pile or a brick.

You can take it to pieces in order to build something else with the bricks. You

can pull it down in order to use the space it occupies for another building. Or

you can give it a new significance because you have stopped thinking about it as

simply a pile of bricks. This is what we’re doing. (26)

In this passage he is also reflecting on the role of an architect. He realises the impact he and his fellow workers have on the shape of the city and places in general and although he realises his effort is no more than a drop in the ocean, he feels certain responsibility towards the city.

Matthew’s movement through the city does not concentrate only on the area of the Docklands, but he comments on other famous parts of London as well. What is compelling on London is that it is composed of many small quarters, each true to type in its own way, and Matthew notices it: “(he is) headed on into Soho, moving within fifty yards from one landscape to another, crossing one of those invisible frontiers which section the city off into areas, each with its own flavour, its own climate” (36). He appreciates the variety and is able to acknowledge how the city is progressive. When he’s passing through the city, he also praises one of the typical touristic places, Covent Garden:

“He liked Covent Garden. You could not but warm to an area that had so successfully been reborn. The place teemed with people, on this warm spring afternoon. It was international, multicultural, eclectic – it was all the things you were supposed to be, in this day and age.” (33) Covent Garden is a quarter in the heart of London which is not only famous for its markets, but also went through a successful renovation during the 18th and the 19th century, which, for Matthew, is something worth keeping in mind.

When the Blackwall project is about to be completed, Matthew contacts an artist

Eva Burden in order to season the sterile building with a piece of something gentle. Eva is known for making sculptures and reliefs from glass by engraving. She also turns out to be a very interesting character with whom Matthew often discusses his view and thoughts on London and its development. She is an immigrant originally from Germany who had to escape as a Jewish child in 1939 and who possesses, as she calls it, a

“refugee mentality” (121). Eva lives by the river Thames, very near to the Docklands site, with a spectacular view over the river that Matthew envies her. Seeing the view leads Matthew into a debate with her over her experience and reflection of London. She describes her view on the city: “And here I am living all my adult life in the middle of

London. That’s what I really know of England. Immigrant’s England – bricks and tarmac.” (126) Note that she is, again, referring to a specific materials that, for her, symbolise the city. But later on she adds that whenever she leaves the city, she misses it deeply: “I need London voices and dirty streets and drunks in the tube and bodies in the river. . . . But the point is that you have been digested. The city has taken you over, in a sense” (127). The city for her is not only a place to live in, but also an entity that defines her. After all, she nicely comments on it in her own words: “You become part of the urban stew and add to it your own little bit of flavour” (177).

When it comes to the matter of immigrants and foreigners living in London,

Lively naturally cannot omit such an important and defining element of the city.

Although McEwan also touches the topic of multiculturalism, Matthew’s London is even more international and multicultural: “He sees, too, that the city speaks in tongues:

Pizza Ciao, King’s Cross Kebab, New Raj Mahal Tandoori, Nepalese Brasserie. . . . The resonances of the place are universal. . . . The whole place is a chronicle, in brick and stone, in silent eloquence, for those who have eyes and ears. For such as Matthew.

Through him, the city lives and breathes; it sheds its indifference, its impervious attachment to both then and now, and bears witness” (3). He puts together places and eras in the same way he connects places and languages; he sees the city as a mixture of influences of all the inhabitants who came to London from all around the world.

He also attributes the city a power to engage one’s mind in an enjoyable way:

“Matthew and Alice pause on the pavement and he thinks of the city flung out all around, invisible and inviolate. He forgets, for an instant, his own concerns, and feels the power of the place, its resonances, its charge of life, its coded narrative” (66). He praises the energy one can gain from the place and the people who occupy it; he appreciates the uniqueness of such feeling. Later in the novel, he claims that “the city feeds his mind,” meaning that he is immensely influenced by it and he is, as he puts it, “its product and its creature” (88). In this passage Matthew emphasizes the connection between an individual and the city – in his life he already got to a point where (similarly to Eva’s words) one cannot exist without the other.

In other part of the book Matthew, after a visit at Eva’s place, is passing through the “tumultuous and discordant landscape of Docklands” (128) and praises the material that is so important for both Eva and the landscape of the city: glass. He thinks of its qualities as well as of its presence everywhere around the city. In his train of thoughts he offers a delicate description of the landscape of the 21st century where the glass takes over the brick:

And London, he saw, was turning into a glass city. The stuff snapped and

glittered all around him, climbing into the skies in columns of smoky grey and

aquamarine and turquoise. Sometimes the façades were mirrors of silver or

copper, throwing back their surroundings – the movement of traffic, the

complexities of other buildings, the flowing clouds. Enigmatic, uncommitted

presences; an architecture of deception. All around, glass was soaring above the

old structures of brick and stone, dwarfing them, distorting them so that they swam

shrunk and misshapen in the shining surface of the new city. (128)

What bothers Matthew a bit is the fleetingness of time and the immensity of the city. When his daughter Jane asks him how many people are there in the world, the child’s question provokes Matthew to think of the insecure feelings he gets when he realises his insignificance. He is aware that being only a small part of something huge is, on the one hand, an opportunity to lead one’s life freely and fully according to the individual’s possibilities, on the other hand it is a scary notion that brings up the topic of constant change and chaos. In his imagination “people flow past them, a host of strangers, glimpsed for a moment and lost for ever. Swallowed by the city – gone, vanished as effectively as if they had died. The city unites and divides, with impartiality, with finality. . . . And Matthew is filled suddenly with a vision of the city as a place of terrifying haphazard loss and severance, of people circling in search of one another.” (140)

Returning to the architecture of London, in City of the Mind as well as in

Saturday the iconic terrace houses are mentioned; the type of a house most frequently tiled with stock bricks that immediately comes to mind of everyone who ever visited

London or other cities in the United Kingdom. Matthew says that “London’s trademark is undoubtedly the terrace house. . . . Whether utilitarian in stock brick or lordly in shining white stucco, it supplies that image of order, of sobriety and of grace which is the essential feature of the London landscape. Here is an efficient machine for living, which is also a creative element in the design of a city.” (89) In Saturday the presence of a terrace house is evident – Perowne’s family lives in one. Perowne calls it (together

28 with the part of the Fitzroy Square where the house is located) an “eighteenth-century dream bathed and embraced by modernity” (5).

There are few interesting details in both books that are partly based on the origin of the protagonists and that connect to the previously mentioned prejudices towards the lower classes. Both Rutter and Baxter make, in a dialogue with one or the other main characters, a small remark in the Cockney accent which immediately ranks them as members of the lower classes. For both novelists this is a subtle way of putting together an image of the protagonists who provoke conflict and make trouble. “You wouldn’t be taking the michael, would you, Mr Halland?” (58) asks Rutter, meaning Matthew would not be joking about something. And when Baxter and his accomplice break into the house of Perowne’s family, he shouts at his pal “Oi Nige. . . You can come in now. Pick up them phones” (208). ‘Oi’ is an interjection associated with the Cockney accent, and the grammatically incorrect use of the pronoun ‘them’ also suggests Baxter’s lack of education and his working-class origin.

It is best to close up this part of the thesis by attempting to answer a pressing question: why is the novel entitled “City of the Mind”? The concept of a city that is only in the mind of an individual accompanies the reader throughout the whole novel. As

Matthew explains to Tony, “This city is entirely in the mind. It is a construct of the memory and of the intellect. Without you and me it hasn't got a chance” (7). This notion is closely connected to the one of a fleeting and abstract image of time. Matthew constantly reminds himself that what he sees is not only a matter of place, but also a matter of time. As he sees it, when he’s “driving through the city, he is both here and now, there and then. He carries yesterday with him, but pushes forward into today, and tomorrow, skipping as he will from one to the other. He is in London, on a May morning of the late twentieth century, but is also in many other places, and at other times” (2).

Conclusion

The thesis analyses the depiction of London in the two contemporary British novels Saturday and City of the Mind. As it has been proved, the methods of depicting

London and materialising the city in literature differ significantly in both novels. While

Saturday offers an insight into the life of London’s upper-middle class, City of the Mind presents the city in a broader perspective. The main difference between McEwan’s and

Lively’s contribution to the topic is the way they work with the time frame of their novels. While in Saturday the reader experiences a day in the life of the main protagonist, in City of the Mind time is a quantity that stretches and offers new perspectives. Lively adds to the picture of the city not only plentiful historical hints but also dreamy sequentions that create the notion of the city in the run of time.

Thus, as the picture of London in Saturday is more down-to-earth than the one in City of the Mind, it can be said that McEwan’s depiction of London is more accurate than the Lively’s. Nevertheless, Lively’s approach brings up new and interesting points in how the city in literature can be perceived. Matthew Halland’s London is a city that relies on its history and is a continuation of times that passed. On the other hand, Henry

Perowne’s London is a place that exists now, in a specific moment of time.

McEwan’s approach resembles the philosophy of impressionistic painters who desired to capture a specific moment in life. And what we see in Saturday is, in a way, a snapshot of London that existed only in one specific moment. In contrary, Lively’s

London is imaginative and relies on the individual experience of a person as well as on his knowledge and background.

It can be said about both protagonists that they admire the city and they appreciate the possibilities life in a megapolis in the 20th century offers. In both novels

30 the central characters praise the city for its vitality, sustainability and functionality. In a sense, they are amazed by the urban structure’s possibilities. Undoubtedly, the fact that they are both relatively wealthy and successful in their lives enables them to fully make use of the opportunities the city provides. The contrast between the wealthy and the poor living in the city is represented in the characters of Baxter in Saturday and Rutter in City of the Mind. The thesis also touches upon the problem of multiculturalism; this issue is materialised in several minor characters such as Andrea and Eva. The problems those characters deal with and what they think of London is crucial for presenting the city from another perspective.

The core parts of the thesis are the chapters entitled “Henry Perowne’s London” and “Matthew and his Philosophical View of the City and Time”. In these chapters the comparative analysis of the two novels is presented.

Appendix

Figure 1. The map of London with marked location of Fitzrovia.

Figure 2. The map of the Docklands.

Bibliography

List of Primary Sources

McEwan, Ian. Saturday. Vintage Books, 2006. Print.

Lively, Penelope. City of the Mind. Penguin Books, 2010. Print.

List of Secondary Sources

“About Fitzrovia London”. Fitzrovia.org.uk. Fitzrovia Neighbourhood

Association, fitzrovia.org.uk/about/fitzrovia. Accessed 10 Nov 2017.

Brookner, Anita. Five Tales of the City. The Spectator Archive. archive.spectator.co.uk/article/6th-april-1991/30/five-tales-of-one-city. 6 Apr 1991, pp.

30. Accessed 3 Nov 2017.

Butler, Tim. Re-urbanizing London Docklands: Gentrification, Suburbanization or New Urbanism? International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Volume

31.4. Dec 2007, pp. 759–81. Ebsco. DOI:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2007.00758.x

Chalupský, Petr. A Horror and a Beauty: The World of Peter Ackroyd’s London

Novels. Karolinum Press, 2016. Print.

Chalupský, Petr. The Postmodern City of Dreadful Night. The Image of the city in the works of Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. VDM Verlag Dr. Muller

Aktiengesellschaft & Co. KG. Saarbrucken, 2009. Print.

Chen, Chung-jen. “London is ‘Waiting for Its Bomb’: History, Memory, and

Fear of Destruction in Ian McEwan’s Saturday.” Wenshan Review of Literature and

Culture, Vol.5.2 (June 2012), pp. 105-134. Ebsco. Accessed 14 Apr 2015.

“Fitzrovia, Westminster/Camden.” Hidden London. 2017, hidden- london.com/gazetteer/fitzrovia. Accessed 10 Nov 2017.

Lehan, Richard. The City in Literature. An Intellectual and Cultural History.

University of California Press, 1998. Print.

“London Docklands, Canary Wharf History.” eastlondonhistory.co.uk. eastlondonhistory.co.uk/london-docklands-canary-wharf. Accessed 15 Nov 2017.

Moran, Mary Hurley. “The Novels of Penelope Lively: A Case for the

Continuity of the Experimental Impulse in Postwar British Fiction.” South Atlantic

Review, vol. 62, no. 1, 1997, pp. 101–120. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3201201.

Ross, Michael L. “On a Darkling Planet: Ian McEwan’s Saturday and the

Condition of England.” Twentieth Century Literature, Vol.54, No. 1 (Spring 2008), pp.

75-96. Ebsco. Accessed 14 Apr 2015.

“What is Coade stone?” nationaltrust.org.uk. www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/what-is-coade-stone. Accessed 7 Nov 2017.

Wikipedia Contributors. “15 February 2003 anti-war protests”. Wikipedia. The

Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_February_2003_anti-war_protests. Accessed 10 Nov 2017.

English Resume

This bachelor thesis deals with the depiction of London in literature in the two selected novels, Ian McEwan’ “Saturday” and Penelope Lively’s “City of the Mind”.

The core of the thesis is the comparative analysis of the two novelists’ approaches. The thesis also examines the topic of urbanism in literature.

Czech Resume

Tato bakalářská práce se zabývá zobrazením Londýna v současné britské literatuře, konkrétně v románech “Saturday” Iana McEwana a “City of the Mind”

Penelope Lively. Cílem práce je komparace dvou rozdílných přístupů zobrazení

Londýna v literatuře. Práce se také věnuje tématu urbanismu v literatuře.