Nothing could have been odder or more prophetic

Gillian Darley

  • In Ruins by Christopher Woodward
    Chatto, 280 pp, £12.99, September 2001, ISBN 0 7011 6896 X

I read Christopher Woodward’s book in August and then reread it in September: what a difference a month can make. Insistent images of newly ravaged places, like the ghostly fretwork silhouette which looms over Ground Zero, seem to sneer at us, laughing at our fragile optimism. The notion of the ruin as an expression of violence and blind hatred is not Woodward’s subject, however hard it may be to avoid the connection. His interest lies in the questions raised by empty spaces. ‘When we contemplate ruins,’ he writes, ‘we contemplate our own future.’

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