The East End of London, and Brick Lane in particular, has proved fertile ground for novelists over the past couple of years. Monica Ali's Brick Lane inevitably springs to mind, but other fictional explorations of the area include Matthew D'Ancona's Going East and Tarquin Hall's Salaam Brick Lane (soon to be published). While Jeremy Gavron's third novel inhabits the same geographical space, in approach, it is more reminiscent of Peter Ackroyd's magisterial London: the biography.
Like Ackroyd's book, An Acre of Barren Ground is episodic in structure. Gavron skips from East End Jews to Asian immigrants, from Jack the Ripper to the Second World War. His knowledge of the area is such that he is comfortable writing about different periods, presenting individual human stories against a rich historical backdrop. The novel travels back to when the East End's bomb-sites blossomed with urban fauna, back to when the city was a walled and separate entity. One of the chapters takes place when London was just an outpost of the Roman empire; another is set earlier still.
Instead of presenting a straightforward study of the various groups that have inhabited Brick Lane over the years - weavers, brewers, immigrants, dotcom pioneers - Gavron teases out individual narratives and characters. A Jewish family hoping to buy passage to America unexpectedly ends up in London; a woman descends into the dark sewer tunnels that run beneath the city; a Bangladeshi patriarch contemplates his retirement; Russian anarchists picnic in Epping Forest; a skeleton is unearthed (more than one, in fact); and Dr Johnson's sidekick James Boswell grapples with yet another bout of gonorrhoea.
Misplaced trust is a recurring theme, as is the aroma of beer: the Truman brewery casts its shadow over several of these stories. Gavron charts the history of the brewing industry in Brick Lane in detail, and brings his account right up to date with a chapter on Gunther von Hagens's infamous "Body Worlds" exhibition of "plastinated" cadavers, which took place in the former brewery buildings. Brick Lane's main site of worship - an edifice that started life as a Huguenot church but became a synagogue and then a mosque - also features prominently.
There are nice thematic overlaps and some touching moments, though it seems unnecessary to have not one but two chapters written from the point of view of animals (a fighting dog and a hunted bull). Occasionally, Gavron appears to be attempting too much. The paradoxical effect of his approach is that those who are intrigued by the book's historical detail may be left thirsting for more information: although a good few pages are given over to the architectural curiosity that is No 74 Swanfield Street, Gavron provides no illustration. A bibliography would also have helped.
Yet Gavron does provide insights into his research process: in a chapter on the East London Female Total Abstinence Society, he intersperses the story with excerpts from his source material. Overall, the book is a collage of stylistic approaches: a lay sister's relationship with a kitchen boy is recounted as if the author were describing the events depicted in a 16th-century woodcut; one chapter is written in dry textbook prose, while another takes the form of an excerpt from a graphic novel.
Occasionally, this feels like experimentation for its own sake. At its best, however, An Acre of Barren Ground captures the sense of wonder that the oldest corners of the city can evoke. It is a work to be dipped into rather than read at a single sitting - a book of brilliant moments.
