Writing London: Materiality, Memory, Spectrality is a tour de force, a book that begins with an admission of the inevitable failure of its project and then continues with subtlety, dexterity, and intelligence to turn this failure into a stimulating intellectual journey through some powerful twentieth-century attempts to write the modern urban space nominalized under the name “London,” a word that connotes an ungraspable entity—a palimpsest, a symbol, an allegory, a memory, and an experience; an entity haunted by ghosts of past and future. “It is the work of writing London to figure that formal vision, to produce a materiality of the letter that expresses and irreversibly performs the materiality of the city and its material effects, while maintaining that which is irreducibly invisible in all its spectral force” (12).

The volume is a continuation of Julian Wolfreys's Writing London: The Trace of the Urban Text from Blake to Dickens (1998). In both volumes Wolfreys is concerned to articulate a new urban sensibility through analyzing the interplay between the changing materiality of modern urban space, the written word, and the individual self. In the first volume Wolfreys analyzed how William Blake, Anna Barbauld, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, Thomas de Quincey, Friedrich Engels, William Wordsworth, and Charles Dickens tried to write the new urban metropolis by “tracing a trajectory from the apocalyptic and encrypted to the ineffable and undecidable” (26). The second volume continues this project through analysis of selected works of selected writers from the end of the nineteenth century through the end of the twentieth as examples of ways to “write” what is in fact unwritable. While the subject is “London,” the object is the fusion of urban experience and textual manifestations. “The true city text, the true act of writing the city, allows for the production of the text that, in its formation is analogous with the city, and is thus a performative text inasmuch as it never merely represents or speaks of the city, but enacts the city's assemblage through the assemblage of traces, ruins and remainders that write the city in ruins, though never as such” (217).

After the introduction, the volume begins with a chapter (“The Crisis of Representation”) on fin de siécle writers Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Bram Stoker, as well as Wilkie Collins and Walter Besant. This is followed by chapters on Elizabeth Bowen (“the psychic and phantasmagoric aspects of the city are Bowen's constant concerns” [59]); Maureen Duffy (“the insatiable crisis of memory”), whose text is informed “by a spirit of place, [and] appears as the articulation of dissident, ambivalent, insurgent events” (85); and Peter Ackroyd (“between architecture in ruins and the recurring fragments of language which persist in the everyday speech of the city, Ackroyd traces that sense of `tradition' or ‘continuity’ which is so often perceived in his writing in a more general manner and is assumed to be that which Ackroyd creates” [133]). A chapter entitled “Sites of Resistance, Sites of Memory” explores Iain Sinclair's “delirious fictions”; “his project [is] creating a London that is, itself, in its excessive play of memory's traces, a site of resistance” (161). A concluding chapter (“A coincidence of disparate incidents: London undone or, seven artists [Rachel Lichtenstein, Gavin Jones, Brian Catling, Aidan Andrew, Rachel Whiteread, Patrick Keiller, Michael Moorcock] in search of the city”) discusses how these artists “through text, photography, film, and installation” reveal the city as “having that ‘materiality without matter’ announced by Jacques Derrida” (213). “London becomes, but becomes undone constantly, its traces and ruins resonating before and beyond any determinable whole in the vertiginous echolalia of its visionary anamnesis” (236).

All the writers under review (as well as Wolfreys writing the writing of London) “attempt to bear witness faithfully … to London, and so respond to the materiality of the city through the materiality of language and the interanimation between the two materialities” (5). The results become part of the sense of “London” (i.e., fin de siécle London as dark, foggy, labyrinthian, and dangerous), thus demanding further efforts to write a denser object further layered and infiltrated by not only these previous writings of London but also by endlessly destroyed and newly produced material remains. Each new text thus punctuates (one of Wolfreys's favorite words) “London” resulting in further demands for more writings, and so on and on in a dizzying and endless spiral of texts, memory, materiality, and “ghosts” from a past that is not past and a future adumbrated in the present.

Wolfreys's two books are themselves part of this endless generation of writings of London and will have to be woven into any future efforts. One part of his method is a dense embedding of his textual analysis in contemporary cultural theory—Walter Benjamin of course, Jacques Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Guy deBord, Avital Ronell, and many others. Wolfreys wears the theory easily and intelligently, but it can weigh more or less heavily on the reader depending on your tolerance for specialized language and abstraction. In line with the overall interest in the interweaving the personal and the material, the author's assurance both in the theoretical grounding of his work and the brilliant close readings of passages from his chosen writers is itself “punctuated” with a charm that both reaffirms his personal authority and modestly disclaims it.

Of course Wolfreys's written London is itself a fragment, though as an interpreter of that fragment he is unmatched. He has pulled on one thread of an ineffable tapestry, a thread that will feel familiar to many academic readers (and that is whom this book is for) in its sense of “London” as an unknowable, ungraspable, and haunted cultural phenomenon. It is the threads of conventional modernism and postmodernism that he has so skillfully picked apart. But there are other possible threads. For example, even though he acknowledges the “mis-reading” of the fin de siècle writers he considers, he does not mention any alternate tradition to the London of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or Dracula or Dorian Gray or Sherlock Holmes, such as might be evident if he had chosen to turn to the burgeoning popular periodical press of the 1890s. There he might have found a less dark and ineffable “London.” Rather than the dangerous Thames of “The Sign of Four” or the East End of The Picture of Dorian Gray, he could have found the generous, sunshiny urban spaces of Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men on a Boat, to Say Nothing of the Dog (still in print today) not to mention the many friendly, bright, and unthreatening London sketches in his popular 1890s journal The Idler. What would London look like if Wolfreys peered through Mr. Punch's eyes?

This is an observation not a criticism, for Wolfreys has anticipated my resistance to what can feel like a totalizing view in Writing London by admitting both at the beginning and at the end of the volume that its project is doomed to failure. Different readers may feel this “failure” in different ways, but all of us will gain much by reading (and writing about) Wolfreys's writing writers writing London from the early nineteenth century into the early years of the twenty-first.