From a flight with the avian police who patrol the city ("an endless origami unfolding, stretching out horizontally rather than vertically") by helicopter, Sandhu quickly moves down to street level where he begins to explore a theme that runs through many of these pieces: London, for all its commercial power and cultural dynamism, is revealed when the sun goes down as a filthy city in need of a thorough cleansing, both physical and moral. He accompanies the night cleaners, most of them African, observing that "if the city is a text, then cleaners do their best to erase the jottings and doodles that have been inscribed upon it." Along with the men known as "flushers" (more than 300 of them two decades ago, now reduced to 39), he descends into the fetid and lard-filled world of the London sewers to investigate the rumor of giant hairballs some claim threaten to clog the pipes. He doesn't find them, but when he recounts the story of a 150-sq.-ft. "fat iceberg" that took six weeks of manual labor in blazing summer heat and "supersucker machines" to dislodge from under Leicester Square, one doesn't know whether to laugh or retch.
Not content with a simple recounting of these quotidian efforts to keep the city habitable, Sandhu employs the cover of darkness to tunnel into London's spiritual heart. He spends an evening with the Samaritans, volunteers who man an all-night telephone hotline, "human sponges, absorbing hurt and perplexity from sprawling suburbs, gated compounds in Kensington to high-rise estates in Peckham," and attends an exorcism of the ghosts of a long abandoned jail. But perhaps the most moving essay, the final one, tells the story of the Tyburn nuns--"channels for the city's deepest fears and yearnings"--whose order has been conducting an all night prayer vigil in London for more than 100 years.
There's much more to savor in this elegant work: graffiti artists, mini-cab drivers, sleep technicians and Thames barge operators are some of London's night people whose company Sandhu keeps, and every page bristles with their brutally honest judgments on this imposing city. When its surface glitter is peeled away, nighttime London can be either an awesome or an awful place and, when he looks closely at it, Sukhdev Sandhu doesn't flinch.--Harvey Freedenberg