London Fog: The Biography

Abstract

the protests. Gracefully translated, with an illuminating and exhaustive introduction , by Rita S. Nezami, By Fire is a work of imaginative empathy and real compassion. Upon reading the work of fiction in one sitting, Nezami spontaneously combusted into translation: “There are urgent stories out there that need to be told in as many languages as possible and made available to world readers.” Ben Jelloun, for his part, trusts in the power of literature to enflesh a symbol, lend voice to silent masses, and get to the heart of a human drama more powerfully than any news report might. “I focused on Mohamed’s story,” he says in an interview. “I closed my eyes, I saw it, and I wrote it. Beyond the specific situation in Tunisia , Mohamed Bouazizi became a valuable symbol for all cultures and all countries in pursuit of dignity.” Also collected in this slender volume are Ben Jelloun’s nonfiction accounts of the political backstory, The Spark. Here, he categorically condemns dictatorship and police brutality in Tunisia and throughout the Arab world, contrasting their cruelty and corruption to the living poem of an oppressed people rising up in peaceful resistance (specifically, in Tunisia and Egypt). All first-rate poetry is occupied with morality, according to T. S. Eliot; and By Fire, in its quietly lyrical way, is above all a moral book. Reading it is meant to prick our conscience and disturb us, as we consider the pitiable conditions and institutionalized injustice that push a human being to use his body as a last site of protest, to die in order to be heard. Together, the nonfiction and fiction sections complement one another in telling the humiliating life story of our desperate protagonist, from the inside and out, with plainspoken and urgent prose. “Despair is betrayal” was one of the slogans of the Egyptian Revolution, urging people not to lose hope in change. In that sense, this is not a despairing work but a reminder of what was once possible and what is still at stake if—through ignorance, apathy, or worse—we look the other way when confronted with the suffering of millions of innocent others. Yahia Lababidi Ft. Lauderdale, Florida Christine L. Corton. London Fog: The Biography. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2015. 391 pages. Debates swirl as to whether and to what extent humans have affected and can affect the climate. Not surprisingly, studies of climate ’s effect on human culture find attentive readers. Adam Gopnik’s elegant essays in Winter: Five Windows on the Season (2012) and Cynthia Barnett’s acclaimed Rain: A Natural and Cultural History (2015) set the stage for this study. London Fog is a fascinating account of London’s climate from the seventeenth century to the 1960s, when pollution abatement measures began to have a real effect. Smoke from seacoal used by breweries and coal or wood fires from homes intensified during the industrial revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, bringing both factories and increased population. A “Peasouper” or a “London Particular” became terms for the thickest and longest-lasting fogs, usually occurring in winter when all the hearth fires were burning. Exhaustive research surveying accounts from the famous and obscure, residents and foreigners, artists, cartoonists, and authors creates a weighty mass of testimonies on the appearance, smells, psychological and social effects of London fog through the years. I confess to growing a bit weary at each new account focused on describing the fog in terms not remarkably different from earlier descriptions. In a sense, however, the book will serve as an essential reference on the subject. The most interesting portions of this study are the Punch cartoons, the paintings variously foregrounding or erasing the fog to meet the tastes of the times, and the fiction writers’ use of the fog. Before Turner, Whistler, and Monet, before impressionism took hold, painters risked their popularity if they presented realistic scenes of London landmarks obscured by fog. There is ample testimony from major and minor writers—Dickens, Doyle, Wells, Galsworthy, and James among the former. Popular minor writers created what Corton calls “fog apocalypse stories,” in which the fog functions as a suffocating shroud that...