Reviews
London
Spirits: Short Stories by Rob
Burton
Stories celebrating the past and present London with a
mixture of humor, pathos, and affection.
Anyone who has walked the streets of London knows how profoundly history haunts the city. From its monuments and memorials to its blue-circled plaques, London wears the past with style, decorum, and a certain spirit. London Spirits pays homage to this spirit using narrators (some dead, some alive; some historical, some fictional) who have a particularly interesting story to tell about their life and times in this great metropolis. There’s Philip Clark, plumber to Westminster Abbey, who recounts a “cock-eyed” version of William and Mary’s Coronation in 1689. There’s Virginia Woolf who takes one last walk through Regent’s Park in her waning days and revisits her past with powerful stream-of-consciousness memories. There’s a contented suburban mother-of-two who is suddenly forced to confront her heady, “romantic” days as a London University student twenty years earlier. Other spirits include an Egyptian mummy in the British Museum; the Celtic warrior queen—Boadicea--at the millennium celebrations; a black British writer reflecting on his role as an artist in response to the racially-motivated murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993; and an eccentric stranger in a pub who shares similar traits as the painter, Joseph Turner.
