London street atlas

The London street atlas is Gibreel Farishta’s practical plan for redeeming London: a comprehensive guide to the city he believes he has been restored to save. Its orderly geography gives shape to his mission, but the city changes around him until the map can no longer guide him and is eventually discarded.

The atlas and Gibreel’s mission

After leaving Alleluia Cone, Gibreel finds the atlas in the right-hand pocket of his overcoat, where it has remained since he departed Rosa Diamond’s house. He treats it as a guide to Proper London, capital of Vilayet, laid out in exhaustive detail. The book makes his new resolve tangible: he will redeem the city, and the atlas will tell him where to begin and how to proceed.

A mapped route through London

Gibreel turns the atlas into a master plan for doing good. He intends to work across the mapped area square by square, from Hockley Farm at its north-western corner to Chance Wood in the south-east. At the imagined end of his labours, he might play golf at Wildernesse, a course situated at the map’s edge. The route gives his redemptive ambition a defined scope and sequence, as if a city could be saved by following its streets from one boundary to another.

The map fails

London does not remain within the atlas’s coordinates. Its streets and landscapes shift without warning: Gibreel can pass from a colonnade of human flesh into an uncharted wasteland, see familiar landmarks crumbling in the wind, or emerge into West End streets where acid falls from the sky. The changing city defeats the systematic approach the atlas was meant to enable. As Gibreel’s confidence falters and his mission turns into a struggle with a city he cannot comprehend or change, the street atlas is discarded.

Narrative significance

The atlas sets geographical order against London’s unstable, mirage-like form. At first it appears to make Gibreel’s immense task legible, converting redemption into a route with identifiable limits and an endpoint. Its eventual uselessness marks the gap between a plan imposed on a place and the unruly reality of that place: the map can chart streets, but it cannot secure Gibreel’s authority over the city or make its transformations intelligible.