Recently I was asked to write a piece about Britain and why
my time travel novel, The River of No Return, is set in that country rather than in my own. It was a curiously difficult piece to
write. I’ve now spent nearly two decades
shacked up with a Brit, I’ve lived in England for years on end, I’ve done the
usual reading of novels that either romanticize or despise it. It’s a complicated place for me. I ended up
deciding to write about Britain as a fantasy space, and if you’re interested
you can read that piece, here:
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| David Young |
But before I wrote that piece, I found myself thinking back
to the first time I lived in London, when I was twenty years old. Back when Britain really was brand new to
me. It was an amazing six months, partly
because of my beloved English professor David Young, who took me and twenty other Oberlin students to London. He introduced us to the theater, but more than that, to good living and a certain relaxed relationship to intelligent
conversation . . . he showed us that a life of the mind is a life of joy.
But my semester was also magical because of the accident of where I lived
during those months. Ten other Oberlin students and I were crammed into an old
Georgian row home in Bonnington Square, in Vauxhall -- a London neighborhood on the south bank of the Thames. We were all English majors, and we were spending a semester taking a class on the history of the
“masque” and going to as many plays as we could fit in.
It was an incredible semester, and Bonnington Square was at
the heart of it. The old 18th
century Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens -- so notorious, so perfectly naughty, and now dwindled to nothing but a bare, dock-infested expanse of lawn -- were 100 meters
away. We used to walk across that scrubby green and wonder if the sex, the thrills, the
theater of the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens had soaked into the earth, or whether they were
gone –dissipated into the sky.
A new garden – Bonnington Square Garden – was being crafted
on our doorstep. It had been a
bomb-site, and then a wasteland of stinging nettles -- now neighbors were
coming together to make it into something rich and wondrous. Our neighbors to the left were squatters
with the most amazing sense of style -- we watched as they transformed their
house from a Georgian ruin into a grungy, post-industrial palace. An array of caravans painted with mysterious
symbols turned up each month at the full moon, disgorging druids and witches –
apparently a “ley line,” an ancient path that some said was a source of magical
power, ran through Bonnington Square. Down
the road the Bonnington Square Café, which had started as a squat café and
which served up rib-sticking vegan treats by candlelight, drew us in
at lunchtimes, and we would stay all day, wondering if there were anywhere like
this, anywhere at all, in America.
We adored Bonnington Square.
My friends and I, rolling out of bed late after a long night at the
theater and then in the clubs, where we dressed like fallen angels and danced
until we saw god, used to sit on the steps drinking our coffee and watching the
square. There the squatters would come,
heaving some talismanic metal object they had found in the defunct marble factory
around the corner, or discarded on the street.
There was the community coalition, digging in their patch of bomb-scarred
earth. A druid leaned against his
caravan, sucking on a cigarette and watching us through narrowed eyes. His girlfriend stuck an arm out a tiny open
hatch, and he passed the cigarette through to her. 
It felt as if history were unhinged here in this little
square, as if everything that had ever happened was being remade and
repurposed, and even we had our place in it – for weren’t we the 18th
century pleasure seekers, so young and flamboyant, who came here from afar to a
fleeting, lantern-lit masquerade, our eyes dazzled by fountain shows and
fireworks, intent upon nothing more than play and dalliance?
I found myself
thinking about Bonnington Square again as I wrote The River of No Return, which
is a big, genre-mash up of a time travel novel, set largely in London. It’s part spy adventure, part sci-fi epic,
part romance – and although my characters never go anywhere near Vauxhall,
either in 1815 or in 2013 – the novel is also part Bonnington Square.
In The River of No Return, the characters travel through
time on currents of human emotion. My
time travelers, who all share a rare talent, are able to move with the undertow
of human feeling below the still surface of the present. My characters are
dislocated in time by the violence of war, and they try, perhaps fruitlessly,
to rebuild beauty from the wreckage.
Because my characters exist in many various times, they have a somewhat Robin
Hoodish attitude to property and to wealth.
And because they are dislocated, adrift, they are masqueraders, seeking
what pleasure they can grasp from the always disappearing world around them,
and from the warm, willing “naturals” who live their lives from day to day,
without ever suspecting that time is malleable and that history itself is up
for grabs.
If the ley lines and the squatters and the bomb garden and
the pleasure gardens are all to be found threaded through The River of No Return, so is joy. I have spent many
semesters in London since then, but none of them so perfectly delightful. As a scholar and a historian I have spent
countless days thinking about the way that the past penetrates the present, but
I have never experienced it with such picaresque sparkle as I did across those
six months. I wrote the novel to make
myself happy – I intended to make a big cake layered up with the many pleasures
of many genres and with the voluptuous details of many eras. And I did make myself happy! But perhaps I was simply remembering a
happiness I already knew, writing a chronicle of that one, perfect semester in
that one, magical square.
Bonnington Square – like the rest of London – has changed
enormously since 1992. But it is still
itself. It hasn’t been uprooted and
destroyed. The squatters are still there. You can watch a video about
them here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/video/2010/jul/06/sustainable-squatting-bonnington-square
The café is still
there. The garden is still there. Gentrification has happened and yet
Bonnington Square has managed to maintain itself, at least partially, as a
space that exists slantwise across that superhighway to bourgeois
appropriation. And I am so very grateful
that I got to be there, fleetingly, like a ghost, for a brief moment long ago.