The Great Fire of London by Peter Ackroyd, 1982
I realised fairly early on that I had made a mistake in choosing to read this book, despite it having been on my shelves for (literally) several decades. The mistake lay in the fact that the novel is a retelling of Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit, and Little Dorrit is one of the very few, possibly the only, Dickens novel that I haven’t read. To be fair, a novel called The Great Fire of London (1666) isn’t an obvious retelling of a novel set in Victorian England, but perhaps I am missing something? I was certainly going to miss all of the subtle references to the source material in Ackroyd’s novel, and was therefore faced with the decision – to push on regardless, or wait until I had read the original?
I pushed on. Little Dorrit is now top of my list of Dickens novels to be read and I will surely experience the slightly bizarre sensation of reading a source novel and spotting influences in reverse. I will let you know how it goes of course. But could The Great Fire of London stand on its own as a novel worth reading?
Yes and no. The novel tells the story of a film-maker producing Little Dorrit in the London streets of its original setting, with a varied cast of eccentric characters, many of which almost certainly have Dickensian originals. It is very short – less than 200 pages – which is very unDickensian – and mildly entertaining. The characters were largely unlikeable and didn’t come to life – I didn’t really care what happens to them. We don’t spend enough time with any of them to get to know them properly and they remained essentially caricatures. In any case what happens to them is usually telegraphed well in advance – an abusive affair ends badly, a gay romance fizzles out, the planned film is incomplete due to production problems, and so on – even the Great Fire we were promised in the novel’s title was as predictable as the iceberg in Titanic. And the novel’s title is misleading – this story has nothing to do with the Great Fire of London – and while the story ends of a conflagration of the film set, that simply acts as a convenient climax for the plot rather than anything more symbolic or meaningful.
So far I appreciate I haven’t found much positive to say about the novel. It seemed burdened by its source material rather than inspired by it. There are only glimpses of the author that Ackroyd was to develop into, and I am not surprised the novel is no longer in print. I occasionally pop over to Goodreads to see what other reviewers have thought of things, as a sense check as much as anything. This succinct review stood out: “A pretentious, miserable book about pretentious, miserable people.” Bizarrely the reader gave the novel two stars! Another reviewer claimed the novel is a “Fictionalised account of the great fire of London. Not too bad, but also not really all that good, or so I thought.” which suggests they really didn’t read it at all (or reviewed the wrong book!)
The Reading Bug 