Caught in swirling eddies of 'Thames'

Now in his 60th year, Peter Ackroyd is one of those forces of literary nature that British letters regularly seems to throw up -- 14 novels, five works of nonfiction, 10 biographies (some of them very fine), two collections of poetry and two of criticism, a play, television scripts and even a clutch of children's books. He's also been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and achieved sufficient popular success within his own country to command very handsome advances -- for which he has been resented.

All in all, he's a very English writer not simply by experience but also by temperament. Once, asked by an interviewer whether he'd come away from a biographical project liking his subject, Ackroyd replied, "That is not really a question I can answer. I try and understand him, thus making him live again for the reader. But it is as if you were asking me if I like one of the characters in my novels. You neither like nor dislike them. You have to bring them alive. That is all."

London is the great exception, because Ackroyd long has been deeply in love with the city of his birth. Twenty years ago, he mused that "London has always provided the landscape for my imagination . . . and, I suppose, becomes a character -- a living being -- within each of my books. . . . All of my books, biography and fiction alike, are single chapters in the book which will only be completed at the time of my death. Then I hope the city itself will be seen as a metaphor for the nature of time and the presence of the past in human affairs." In 2000, Ackroyd took the plunge and declared his affection more explicitly with his sprawling (and bestselling) "London: The Biography." As we know, however, a river runs through it and thus this new book, "Thames: The Biography," which, along with "Albion: Origins of the English Imagination," rounds out a triptych of what the author calls "historical sociologies" exploring the spiritual and aesthetic connections in the English sense of place.

Clearly, the author considers the Thames as much more than a river that rises in Gloucestershire and meanders poetically through countryside and capital, then on to Dickens' storied mud flats and the North Sea. In fact, something crucial about Ackroyd's approach to "Thames" can be divined from the British edition's subtitle, "Sacred River," rather than "The Biography," which the American version bears. The Celts and, perhaps, the indigenous Britons who preceded them, regarded bodies of water -- and particularly rivers -- as sacred. (Anyone who's ever been to the British Museum will recall the metal artifacts fished from the Thames around Battersea and apparently tossed in as sacrifices to a river deity.)