Shadows of London - Jonathan Wood

Jonathan Wood is the author and editor of a sequence of journals, chapbooks and serialised fictions issued from the late Eighties and on into the Nineties that were visionary and apocalyptic, and shared with Arthur Machen a keen interest in the mystical undercurrents of London. He has continued to explore these and related matters in his literary work since.

The modern, cosmopolitan, mercantile city meshes at every step with another city composed of myth, arcane history and unsolved mysteries. The tube map as a kabbalistic diagram, the upper rooms of obscure pubs as the headquarters of occult sects, the cellars of bookshops as nexuses of textual synchronicity. There is London and there is ShadowLondon.

Shadows of London, sub-titled A Whispered Nightshade for After Years (Zagava) is a further exploration of the secret city. The author modestly describes its contents as ‘fragments and meditations or prose poetry meanders and rituals’. But here are intensely concentrated observations whose brevity has the same distilled quality to be found in Hubert Crackanthorpe’s Vignettes, that 1890s slim volume of Embankment lamplight and the satanic glitter of fallen fruit.

It as a work that notices fine, fugitive details: fallen leaves, footsteps, children’s babble, clock chimes, the activities of magpies, the shuttered office of a ticket-collector.

The book evokes the brooding atmosphere before the fiery riots of 1978, when the author had recently come to live in the city, the ‘gnostic modernism’ of the new high rise architecture casting its shadows over the city, and a visit to a subterranean cinema in quest of the uncensored version of a film by certain cult art-provocateurs.

Shadows of London is a contemporary London Adventure, as rich and ruminatory, as deep and diversionary, as labyrinthine and lapidary, as Machen’s book, yet told in Jonathan Wood’s distinctive Armagnac style. It is available in a limited first edition of 199 hardback copies, and also in paperback.

(Mark Valentine)