Childhood memories
“Something shimmered through the middle of the gateway. Something very bright. The tip of a tyger’s tail. It glimmered before their eyes with perfect symmetry, like the end of a golden thread.”
As with the tiger in William Blake’s poem The Tyger, the eponymous tyger is always spelt with a ‘y’? Was this a deliberate echo back to Blake? SF admits: “Blake is absolutely an influence; he was right there in my childhood reading. I remember when we were at primary school, we did Blake’s great poem The Tyger and we were all spell bound. I was mesmerised by this poem, it’s so powerful.’ SF went back to the poem and had an almost Proustian encounter, as he explains: “I had the experience I often have when re-encountering texts that I loved as a child. It’s extraordinary, it’s as though you are back in a fever-dream you had a child. I then went on to read everything Blake ever wrote and looked at as many of his pictures as I could and read about his life. Blake became a
Spring-Summer 2023
big part of the development of the world and the imagery and the language, even the characters in the book. The real spark comes from the poem The Tyger itself.” The London that William Blake would have known also fed through into the setting of the novel.
“At the same time that we were looking into William Blake’s poetry and art, I was also reading his life in biographies. Blake’s London, I found fascinating. In the late Eighteenth Century when he is writing The Tyger, the Northern edge of London is more or less around where King’s Cross St Pancras is now – beyond that is open fields. Camden Town is a proper town, it’s a separate entity. Highgate and Hampstead are little villages way to the North. At that time enclosures are really beginning to kick in.
“Blake’s London and my London overlap in a lot of ways, but I’m so used to London being what it is now that it’s really powerful to imagine it in this different way, to follow along walks that Blake himself might have done.’
Hidden depth
Photography that SF undertook for a book called London’s Lost Rivers
by Tom Bolton was also important in developing the setting for the novel – as well as helping to inform the maps which illustrator Dave McKean would create for the book’s endpapers. “Everyone knows the Thames, but there are all these tributaries which have often been concreted over or turned into sewers. You can still see these traces wherever you go. They give glimpses into the history that is beneath our feet everywhere we go in London.”
SF had a lot of fun taking places he knew and doing something different with them, saying: “In a London where Tyburn is still Tyburn and where there are still gallows there and public executions, if all of that is still happening, you can probably fill in some of the gaps yourself as to what else might be happening.
“The Empire was still growing and growing and bringing more and more of the world under its dominion in the time of William Blake. You have slavery and although there was the start of an abolitionist movement, it hadn’t really got anywhere yet. If the London of Tyger feels resonant, it’s partly because a lot of the legacy of those things are still with us now. I don’t feel the legacies of Empire,
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