The East End of History

THERE IS A terrific moment in Paul Theroux’s The Family Arsenal, a novel of Conradian shadings set in the terror-stricken, IRA-haunted London of the early 1970s, in which a teenage tearaway called Murf stares bleakly over the River Thames at Greenwich to the northern side. “Isle of Dogs,” he murmurs, as the pallid lights of Millwall gleam up through the murk, “I wouldn’t live there for anything.” As an introduction to London’s East End, this fragment works on two levels. It has the advantage of geographical precision (plenty of East End novels get set in Hackney, in north-east London, which has its own particularity); and it gestures at the pile of quasi-mythological baggage that has always accompanied the East End’s journey into fiction, popular culture, and the wider world beyond.