Complete Map

The duality registered in the title of After London is realised in the (almost unreadable) complete map. Here, the sites of the first half of the book sit on the right, those of the second on the left. This also maps the contrast in scale between the macro time-spaces of geological epochs without human character and the micro time-spaces of Felix’s world. The largest and most connected topos is ‘the Lake’ and its chronotopic value of the 'threshold' speaks for how it joins past and present, and links the text’s two halves. Considering both the Lake’s centrality and the proliferation of waterways, rivers, inlets, streams, marshes, moist places, the novel might just as accurately be named 'Watery England'. Even the land, on Felix’s arrival at ruined 'London', is shifting and volatile, its black water leading to black strands and masses of visible blackness. This abundance of fluid is key, demonstrating the fundamental lack of fixity at the centre of the novel. Nothing is certain – the past is distant, unrecorded, unknown and the future world occupied by the narrator is unspecified and open-ended. Spaces, too, are ungraspable; their literal fluidity echoed in the unfixed naming systems in which 'Oxford' is also 'Sypolis'. Here, then we see that any bridges to the ‘real’ offered by the toporefs – 'Northumbria', 'Chester', 'Ireland' – are contested/distanced by their position in the undetermined future history of the first narrative.