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Londra Yanıyor
Film yönetmeni Spenser Spender, çocukluğunu geçirdiği sokaklara uğradığı bir gün, Charles Dickens'ın romanı Küçük Dorrit'in filmini çekmeye karar verir. Eski Londra'nın ruhunu ve Dickens'ın dünyasını modern Londra'nın büyük bir hapishanesinde ve sokaklarında kuracağı setlerde canlandırmaya çalışacaktır. Spenser'ın harekete geçirdiği hikâye, birbirinden tuhaf ve uyumsuz karakterlerin yolunun kesişmesine neden olur: Sorunlu bir ilişki içinde olduğu karısı Laetitia, Dickens uzmanı öğretim görevlisi Rowan, atari salonu işletmecisi cüce Arthur, bir işçi mahallesinde yaşayan Tim ve içine Küçük Dorrit'in ruhunun girdiğine inanan kız arkadaşı Audrey.
Peter Ackroyd'un sarsıcı bir sona doğru ilerleyen ilk romanı Londra Yanıyor'un arka planındaysa, yazarın bütün kitaplarında olduğu gibi, geçmişin varlığının kendini sürekli hissettirdiği karanlık ve tekinsiz Londra sokakları var.
Peter Ackroyd'un sarsıcı bir sona doğru ilerleyen ilk romanı Londra Yanıyor'un arka planındaysa, yazarın bütün kitaplarında olduğu gibi, geçmişin varlığının kendini sürekli hissettirdiği karanlık ve tekinsiz Londra sokakları var.
176 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1982
4 people are currently reading
426 people want to read
About the author
Peter Ackroyd
187 books1,500 followersPeter Ackroyd CBE is an English novelist and biographer with a particular interest in the history and culture of London.
Peter Ackroyd's mother worked in the personnel department of an engineering firm, his father having left the family home when Ackroyd was a baby. He was reading newspapers by the age of 5 and, at 9, wrote a play about Guy Fawkes. Reputedly, he first realized he was gay at the age of 7.
Ackroyd was educated at St. Benedict's, Ealing and at Clare College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with a double first in English. In 1972, he was a Mellon Fellow at Yale University in the United States. The result of this fellowship was Ackroyd's Notes for a New Culture, written when he was only 22 and eventually published in 1976. The title, a playful echo of T. S. Eliot's Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), was an early indication of Ackroyd's penchant for creatively exploring and reexamining the works of other London-based writers.
Ackroyd's literary career began with poetry, including such works as London Lickpenny (1973) and The Diversions of Purley (1987). He later moved into fiction and has become an acclaimed author, winning the 1998 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the biography Thomas More and being shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1987.
Ackroyd worked at The Spectator magazine between 1973 and 1977 and became joint managing editor in 1978. In 1982 he published The Great Fire of London, his first novel. This novel deals with one of Ackroyd's great heroes, Charles Dickens, and is a reworking of Little Dorrit. The novel set the stage for the long sequence of novels Ackroyd has produced since, all of which deal in some way with the complex interaction of time and space, and what Ackroyd calls "the spirit of place". It is also the first in a sequence of novels of London, through which he traces the changing, but curiously consistent nature of the city. Often this theme is explored through the city's artists, and especially its writers.
Ackroyd has always shown a great interest in the city of London, and one of his best known works, London: The Biography, is an extensive and thorough discussion of London through the ages.
His fascination with London literary and artistic figures is also displayed in the sequence of biographies he has produced of Ezra Pound (1980), T. S. Eliot (1984), Charles Dickens (1990), William Blake (1995), Thomas More (1998), Chaucer (2004), William Shakespeare (2005), and J. M. W. Turner. The city itself stands astride all these works, as it does in the fiction.
From 2003 to 2005, Ackroyd wrote a six-book non-fiction series (Voyages Through Time), intended for readers as young as eight. This was his first work for children. The critically acclaimed series is an extensive narrative of key periods in world history.
Early in his career, Ackroyd was nominated a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984 and, as well as producing fiction, biography and other literary works, is also a regular radio and television broadcaster and book critic.
In the New Year's honours list of 2003, Ackroyd was awarded the CBE.
Peter Ackroyd's mother worked in the personnel department of an engineering firm, his father having left the family home when Ackroyd was a baby. He was reading newspapers by the age of 5 and, at 9, wrote a play about Guy Fawkes. Reputedly, he first realized he was gay at the age of 7.
Ackroyd was educated at St. Benedict's, Ealing and at Clare College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with a double first in English. In 1972, he was a Mellon Fellow at Yale University in the United States. The result of this fellowship was Ackroyd's Notes for a New Culture, written when he was only 22 and eventually published in 1976. The title, a playful echo of T. S. Eliot's Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), was an early indication of Ackroyd's penchant for creatively exploring and reexamining the works of other London-based writers.
Ackroyd's literary career began with poetry, including such works as London Lickpenny (1973) and The Diversions of Purley (1987). He later moved into fiction and has become an acclaimed author, winning the 1998 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the biography Thomas More and being shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1987.
Ackroyd worked at The Spectator magazine between 1973 and 1977 and became joint managing editor in 1978. In 1982 he published The Great Fire of London, his first novel. This novel deals with one of Ackroyd's great heroes, Charles Dickens, and is a reworking of Little Dorrit. The novel set the stage for the long sequence of novels Ackroyd has produced since, all of which deal in some way with the complex interaction of time and space, and what Ackroyd calls "the spirit of place". It is also the first in a sequence of novels of London, through which he traces the changing, but curiously consistent nature of the city. Often this theme is explored through the city's artists, and especially its writers.
Ackroyd has always shown a great interest in the city of London, and one of his best known works, London: The Biography, is an extensive and thorough discussion of London through the ages.
His fascination with London literary and artistic figures is also displayed in the sequence of biographies he has produced of Ezra Pound (1980), T. S. Eliot (1984), Charles Dickens (1990), William Blake (1995), Thomas More (1998), Chaucer (2004), William Shakespeare (2005), and J. M. W. Turner. The city itself stands astride all these works, as it does in the fiction.
From 2003 to 2005, Ackroyd wrote a six-book non-fiction series (Voyages Through Time), intended for readers as young as eight. This was his first work for children. The critically acclaimed series is an extensive narrative of key periods in world history.
Early in his career, Ackroyd was nominated a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984 and, as well as producing fiction, biography and other literary works, is also a regular radio and television broadcaster and book critic.
In the New Year's honours list of 2003, Ackroyd was awarded the CBE.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
December 10, 2021
A quick read, this is Peter Ackroyds first novel and his main character is a film director trying to make a film of Little Dorrit. There’s a broad cast of characters, like a Dickens novel but it never reaches those heights. The Film Finance Board represents the circumlocution office, and it did make me laugh that Sir Frederick suggests that after an accident at the prison where they are filming, that they should just cut the prison scenes out of the film. There’s lots of references directly and indirectly to Little Dorrit throughout. (Strangely for a Dickens fan, Ackroyd makes an error referring to Maggy as Little Mother, not once but 3 times!)
October 20, 2015
I wanted to enjoy this more than I did. There's no question that it's intelligently written and some of it is beautifully phrased. The characters in the story all link in some way to Dickens' Little Dorrit but I don't think it matters if you've read it before reading this. I hadn't. Halfway through, I began to be bored by the characters, quite annoyed by some actually, and started to wonder just what the point of the story is. Eventually I lost patience and hurried through to the end. It's the first fictional work I've read by Peter Ackroyd. I'm a great fan of his non fiction so I'll not give up on him because I didn't enjoy this. I'm disappointed though.
May 4, 2021
A pretentious, miserable book about pretentious, miserable people.
January 29, 2020
Kitaplığımda neden bilmiyorum; fakat üç adet okunmamış Peter Ackroyd kitabı vardı. Oysa bu zamana dek yalnızca bir kitabı, Cinayet Saati'ni, okumuştum ve onu da çok sevdiğimi söylemezdim (kendime bu konuda gerçekten çok kızıyorum, bu ayrı bir konu). Hal böyle olunca Londra Yanıyor'u okumak istedim. Bu kitabı da maalesef çok sevdiğimi söyleyemiyorum.
Kitap Dickens'ın Küçük Dorrit'ini merkeze alıyor. Daha doğrusu kitabın karakterleri Küçük Dorrit etrafında birleşiyor. Yönetmen Spencer Spender, Küçük Dorrit'i beyaz perdeye uyarlamak istiyor ve tüm karakterler bir şekilde bu film etrafında birbirlerine zincirleniyorlar. Ackroyd'un karakterler arasındaki bağı kuruşu hoşuma gitse de kitabı "eee ben bunu neden okudum şimdi" diyerek bitirdim. Okurken sıkılmadım; ama bir tatsızlık hissi de okuma boyunca beni yalnız bırakmadı. Belki Küçük Dorrit'i okumuş olsaydım (tam da yeni sipariş etmiştim üstelik) daha çok keyif alabilirdim, bilemiyorum.
Not: Londra Yanıyor, Ackroyd'un ilk romanıymış.
Kitap Dickens'ın Küçük Dorrit'ini merkeze alıyor. Daha doğrusu kitabın karakterleri Küçük Dorrit etrafında birleşiyor. Yönetmen Spencer Spender, Küçük Dorrit'i beyaz perdeye uyarlamak istiyor ve tüm karakterler bir şekilde bu film etrafında birbirlerine zincirleniyorlar. Ackroyd'un karakterler arasındaki bağı kuruşu hoşuma gitse de kitabı "eee ben bunu neden okudum şimdi" diyerek bitirdim. Okurken sıkılmadım; ama bir tatsızlık hissi de okuma boyunca beni yalnız bırakmadı. Belki Küçük Dorrit'i okumuş olsaydım (tam da yeni sipariş etmiştim üstelik) daha çok keyif alabilirdim, bilemiyorum.
Not: Londra Yanıyor, Ackroyd'un ilk romanıymış.
December 17, 2024
This book is nuts, I’m not entirely sure what it was saying with its weird and twisting story but it was a lot of fun getting there. An extensive list of characters, all of them more or less mad, and a satisfying, unexpected, tragically comical ending.
March 19, 2019
It's curious that Ackroyd, a writer completely lacking in sentimentally, should be so fond of Dickens, who revelled in the stuff.
The characters and events in this, his first novel, are inspired by Little Dorrit. One of those characters, a filmmaker named Spenser Spender, wants to make a contemporary adaptation of the book, aided by a homosexual academic called Rowan. A troubled young woman named Audrey, dreams about Dickens's diminutive heroine and eventually becomes possessed by her.
I haven't read Little Dorrit but I know that Marshalsea Prison, which burnt down in 1885, is central to the story. Rowan visits the site, left empty and commemorated with only a modest plaque. Ackroyd describes the scene as looking like 'a small wound which had never healed'.
That could almost stand for a good phrase to describe the people in this novel. These are the London lost, the London lonely, the London mad - the city's victims, the city's prisoners.
All told this a melancholy, uncertain, somewhat cold effort for Ackroyd to introduce himself with as a writer of fiction. He would quickly go on to do a lot better. Spencer could well be Ackroyd himself at the start of his career, a Londoner in search of a theme and finding it right in front of him:
'Now he had a theme - and it was London itself, wasn't that it?'
3
The characters and events in this, his first novel, are inspired by Little Dorrit. One of those characters, a filmmaker named Spenser Spender, wants to make a contemporary adaptation of the book, aided by a homosexual academic called Rowan. A troubled young woman named Audrey, dreams about Dickens's diminutive heroine and eventually becomes possessed by her.
I haven't read Little Dorrit but I know that Marshalsea Prison, which burnt down in 1885, is central to the story. Rowan visits the site, left empty and commemorated with only a modest plaque. Ackroyd describes the scene as looking like 'a small wound which had never healed'.
That could almost stand for a good phrase to describe the people in this novel. These are the London lost, the London lonely, the London mad - the city's victims, the city's prisoners.
All told this a melancholy, uncertain, somewhat cold effort for Ackroyd to introduce himself with as a writer of fiction. He would quickly go on to do a lot better. Spencer could well be Ackroyd himself at the start of his career, a Londoner in search of a theme and finding it right in front of him:
'Now he had a theme - and it was London itself, wasn't that it?'
3
July 10, 2015
I read this just after reading Little Dorrit, which I had read while visiting London and staying in Southwark. It was fun as a “place” book (as is Little Dorrit) and was frequently witty and amusing, but for the most part I found it rather plodding.
fic-guided
July 14, 2020This is a novel to interest followers of Ackroyd in that it is about his favourite non-novelistic subject – London. It is not an easy read but well worth the effort. The Great Fire of London’s preface is a scenario based on Little Dorrit, but artfully falsified by an inauthentic sentimental climax. The reader is uneasily teleported to an alternative literary universe. Dickens’ novel and his fiction generally echo disconcertingly through Ackroyd’s. The main character, Spenser Spender (a poet manqué, what else?), is struggling to get a film version of Little Dorrit off the ground. At the time the novel was published, Spender was a culturally resonant name. While he was writing The Great Fire of London, Ackroyd had been actively helping the poet Stephen Spender (who had been in the National Fire Service when London burned during the Second World War) with his Collected Poems, published in the same year as this novel. ‘He talks to me like a contemporary’, wrote the sixty-year-old Spender, in his journal, approvingly, about his thirty-two-year-old adviser.
Spenser Spender’s twentieth-century Circumlocution Office is found in the shape of the Film Finance Board. Various Dickensian look-alikes cross Spender’s path. BLEAK HOUSE’S Miss Flite appears for a moment in the King’s Road, pushing a pram ‘filled with scraps of old clothes and newspapers, empty tins of Horlicks and old bottles stuffed with rags’. Our Mutual Friend’s Bradley Headstone (here, Job Penstone) pops up as a grimly self-righteous polytechnic lecturer, pontificating on Dickens’ male chauvinism to a troop of doltish students. Spender is destroyed by a schizoid female Barnaby Rudge, who sets fire to his Marshalsea set. ‘London’ burns. Spender, unlike his namesake, is no fireman and dies fighting the flames. Meanwhile a Quilpian dwarf throws open the prison where the film has been shooting.
It would be a mistake to think from the last episode in his book that Ackroyd is at all deferential to such readings as Lionel Trilling’s: ‘the informing symbol, or emblem, of the book . . . is the prison.’ The novelist is known to be of John Carey’s contemptuous persuasion on the subject of the Dickens industry’s symbol-hunting. He makes his point with a heavily satirised gay Canadian Cambridge don who is researching ‘his’ author, surrounded by congenial works like Dickens: The Baroque Lamp and Dickens and the Twisted Metastasis. So much for the academics.
Ackroyd is a versatile writer. One of his earlier productions was the Eliot-homage treatise Notes for a New Culture. It recalls T. S. Eliot’s maxim about the impossibility of gumming leaves back on trees: the culture of the past, that is to say, cannot easily be brought into line with that of the present. The Great Fire of London plays with this idea of cultural irrecoverability. The Cambridge expert (whom Spender hires as a scriptwriter) cannot bring back the world of Dickens. Nor can Audrey, a lunatic telephonist who claims to be in contact by séance with Amy Dorrit and thinks herself possessed by the Victorian heroine. Least successful of all is Spender’s film reconstruction, for all its authenticity of set and location. In elaborating this pattern, Ackroyd may have had in mind that Dickens himself was describing the Marshalsea not as it stood, but consciously inventing it. As Dickens tells us in the preface to Little Dorrit, in this case he deliberately neglected his customary fieldwork:
Some of my readers may have an interest in being informed whether or not any portions of the Marshalsea Prison are yet standing. I myself did not know, until I was approaching the end of this story, when I went to look. I found the outer front courtyard, often mentioned here, metamorphosed into a butter shop.
Spender is thus engaged in reconstructing not Dickens’ London, but Dickens’ imagination of London.
The Great Fire of London, despite being the author’s first foray into fiction, is cleverly resonant and sharply observed as to scene and character. Ackroyd is especially good on Cambridge high tables and low London gay bars. But – denying the reader any easily anticipated experience (he loves playing with us) – there is no Hollywood-style disaster climax. The narrative ends apocalyptically with another great fire of London, but the event is presented with all the drama of a Keesing’s Archive entry: ‘it inflicted disaster and destruction on the city’, we are told. Nothing more.
Spenser Spender’s twentieth-century Circumlocution Office is found in the shape of the Film Finance Board. Various Dickensian look-alikes cross Spender’s path. BLEAK HOUSE’S Miss Flite appears for a moment in the King’s Road, pushing a pram ‘filled with scraps of old clothes and newspapers, empty tins of Horlicks and old bottles stuffed with rags’. Our Mutual Friend’s Bradley Headstone (here, Job Penstone) pops up as a grimly self-righteous polytechnic lecturer, pontificating on Dickens’ male chauvinism to a troop of doltish students. Spender is destroyed by a schizoid female Barnaby Rudge, who sets fire to his Marshalsea set. ‘London’ burns. Spender, unlike his namesake, is no fireman and dies fighting the flames. Meanwhile a Quilpian dwarf throws open the prison where the film has been shooting.
It would be a mistake to think from the last episode in his book that Ackroyd is at all deferential to such readings as Lionel Trilling’s: ‘the informing symbol, or emblem, of the book . . . is the prison.’ The novelist is known to be of John Carey’s contemptuous persuasion on the subject of the Dickens industry’s symbol-hunting. He makes his point with a heavily satirised gay Canadian Cambridge don who is researching ‘his’ author, surrounded by congenial works like Dickens: The Baroque Lamp and Dickens and the Twisted Metastasis. So much for the academics.
Ackroyd is a versatile writer. One of his earlier productions was the Eliot-homage treatise Notes for a New Culture. It recalls T. S. Eliot’s maxim about the impossibility of gumming leaves back on trees: the culture of the past, that is to say, cannot easily be brought into line with that of the present. The Great Fire of London plays with this idea of cultural irrecoverability. The Cambridge expert (whom Spender hires as a scriptwriter) cannot bring back the world of Dickens. Nor can Audrey, a lunatic telephonist who claims to be in contact by séance with Amy Dorrit and thinks herself possessed by the Victorian heroine. Least successful of all is Spender’s film reconstruction, for all its authenticity of set and location. In elaborating this pattern, Ackroyd may have had in mind that Dickens himself was describing the Marshalsea not as it stood, but consciously inventing it. As Dickens tells us in the preface to Little Dorrit, in this case he deliberately neglected his customary fieldwork:
Some of my readers may have an interest in being informed whether or not any portions of the Marshalsea Prison are yet standing. I myself did not know, until I was approaching the end of this story, when I went to look. I found the outer front courtyard, often mentioned here, metamorphosed into a butter shop.
Spender is thus engaged in reconstructing not Dickens’ London, but Dickens’ imagination of London.
The Great Fire of London, despite being the author’s first foray into fiction, is cleverly resonant and sharply observed as to scene and character. Ackroyd is especially good on Cambridge high tables and low London gay bars. But – denying the reader any easily anticipated experience (he loves playing with us) – there is no Hollywood-style disaster climax. The narrative ends apocalyptically with another great fire of London, but the event is presented with all the drama of a Keesing’s Archive entry: ‘it inflicted disaster and destruction on the city’, we are told. Nothing more.
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November 26, 2024Full of Dickensian characters, relationships & affairs, those that directly know each other & those that are almost in touching distance but remain strangers, this book is a fairly quick & entertaining read. I think Ackroyd does a good job of exploring the personas, thoughts & actions of so many different characters. It appears to be much more about how the characters act & interact with one another than the Little Dorrit filming element itself. Nothing really stood out but it was okay.
September 6, 2017
THIS IS NOT NON-FICTION.
I was led astray.
I wouldn't call it *enjoyable*- none of the characters are really developed or likable and the story is fairly flat- but it is a very quick read and one can see the outlines of an author who is about to come into his own.
I was led astray.
I wouldn't call it *enjoyable*- none of the characters are really developed or likable and the story is fairly flat- but it is a very quick read and one can see the outlines of an author who is about to come into his own.
April 28, 2020
I was disappointed in this. The idea of filming Little Dorrit in Thatcher's London is filled with rich possibilities, but it's patchy, the dialogue is clumsy and uninteresting, and the characterization pretty thin fare, esp the women, Audrey and Laetitia, and the caricature 'homosexual', Rowan.
April 23, 2019
Harika bir ilk roman denemesi.
January 8, 2021
I read this book for research for an school assignment about the subject around The Great Fire of London.
This lovestory made a bad piece of history into a better perspective for me.
This lovestory made a bad piece of history into a better perspective for me.
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June 2, 2021An attempt to film Dickens results in a series of minor misfortunes culminating in terrible catastrophe. Caustic and well-observed.
October 28, 2022
1/6 points, boring story with very boring characters
July 8, 2023
Don't expect Pepys to appear: the title alone has anything to do with the 1660s. Instead, this is a confidently modern novel that approaches 1980s London in the style of Dickens. Ackroyd's homage to Dickens is overt: the pretext is a typically Ackroydian credulity-defying set of coincidences centred on Little Dorrit. A writer, a Cambridge don and a film-maker are all separately crafting interpretations of Little Dorrit, while those around them in the London streets are playing out similar stories of entrapment and indebtedness to those in Dickens's text. It is meta without being heavy. Under the ghostly long-burned-out walls of the Marshelsea debtors prison, both play-actors and the supposedly liberated real lives of Thatcher's London tell a story of confinement.
I sensed a young Ackroyd revelling in his precocity. It's gleeful, with a headlong breathlessness that again calls to mind Russel T. Davies's screenplays. With both, my issue is in suspending disbelief. A comedy of errors is one thing, but the author's hand as puppet master is hard to ignore. The puppets were overshadowed by their controller, even though the show itself was well worth watching.
I sensed a young Ackroyd revelling in his precocity. It's gleeful, with a headlong breathlessness that again calls to mind Russel T. Davies's screenplays. With both, my issue is in suspending disbelief. A comedy of errors is one thing, but the author's hand as puppet master is hard to ignore. The puppets were overshadowed by their controller, even though the show itself was well worth watching.
October 26, 2009
Peter Ackroyd's first novel. It revolves around Dickens, and London past and present - themes that continue to recur in Ackroyd's work. A lot of interesting characters and possibilities, but the narrative lacked in pace and density. A promising rather than accomplished debut. His next novel, THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF OSCAR WILDE is an exponential improvement.
August 9, 2008
It's difficult to read an unimpressive book by an author you admire ... but I see how this early effort by Ackroyd led him to some of his more creative works. I found this one dry and without a satisfactory conclusion.
June 7, 2009
London in the 1980s with a few characters who are introduced in the beginning in short chapters and ultimately come together in a fire at a prison. This was Ackroyd's first novel. Thought it was historical, but was wrong. A VERY quick read.
April 30, 2012
A bit of an odd one...but find I a lot of Ackroyd's books like that. But they are so intriguing. Apparently, Ackroyd is not a fan of his first novel, which I find surprising, but perhaps it's not that unusual. Now I want to read Hawksmoor...
June 11, 2009
Fictionalised account of the great fire of London. Not too bad, but also not really all that good, or so I thought.
May 24, 2012
Another fantastically enjoyable read from one of my favourite authors.
September 21, 2015
Really interesting story and beautifully written
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews