England in the head

Two years ago, in the book London, Peter Ackroyd produced an epic guided tour of the capital. By pounding its pavements, and finding sermons in stones, he was able to expound the history of the city and prove that its streets were indeed paved with gold: car exhausts emit minute traces of the precious metal. Now, in Albion, he has gone way beyond the extra mile to create a guide to the whole of England as it exists in the collective imagination.

Lesser mortals might have been daunted by the prospect of such an undertaking, but not our Peter. He knows where he's going: "There is a path that leads through English literature; it is the path of human agency and human settlement, a pact with the earth leading the traveller forward.

It is the forest path, the waldswathu in Beowulf; it is the trackway along which Jude Fawley walks, weeping, in Jude the Obscure. John Clare rejoiced in 'those crooked shreds/Of footpaths', of which Edward Thomas remarked that 'the more downtrodden, the more they flourish'; they are themselves a sign or token of national feeling, like the long serpentine line which in The Analysis of Beauty William Hogarth named as the line of beauty."

Only a long quotation such as this can illustrate Ackroyd's method. He studies works of the imagination - poems, novels, paintings and buildings - so that, by juxtaposing samples of them that echo and chime, he can highlight a particular theme: in this case, "the allegory of the winding path".

The above list of examples does not end there: Bunyan's Pilgrim, Spenser's Red Crosse Knight and Dickens's Little Nell are also called as witnesses. Ackroyd believes such an approach is peculiarly English. Roger Bacon's essays are said to reflect "a linear imagination" that is "accustomed to consider matters in sequence rather than in system". Discussing Walter Raleigh's History of the World, Ackroyd declares, "the history of literary learning in England is the history of inconsequence and random accretion".

Albion, like Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, is "an encyclopaedic and synthetic work". Ackroyd is a super-synthesiser. The tracks of "English music" that he lays down range from Anglo-Saxon laments to Thomas AdËs.

His vade mecum is also an album, a double CD of Eng Lit's greatest hits: everything from Bede's Historia Ecclesia Gentis Anglorum to Orwell's Animal Farm. It is circular too, the path leading back to where it started: "the English imagination takes the form of a ring or circle".

Ackroyd shows how the English language has survived and thrived by adopting and adapting other tongues. "We can write nothing that has not already been written": in other words, all we can do is reinvent the wheel.

Shakespeare's genius, says Ackroyd, lies in the way he can make words feel "at once startlingly new and hauntingly-familiar". Ackroyd certainly revisits old haunts and is not afraid of recycling himself. For example, the same quotations from Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold and VS Pritchett are used to illustrate that the capital is one big prison in both London and Albion.

The introduction to the latter opens with "Of"; the final chapter closes with "O Albion". The open-vowel sound first heard in Anglo-Saxon verse rolls through this whimsical work forming an "unbroken chain". Ackroyd continues Caedmon's alliterative line, whether noting Langland's "quixotic or quirky" character or Jane Austen's depiction of human nature in its "variability and variety". The rhythm of the prose recalls "the song of the sea".