I’ve nearly finished my journey through the Penguin Lines series, which has had some hits and misses. Unfortunately, Drift is a miss for me. While a good idea, the lack of words just didn’t work for me.

So what does Drift contain? It’s 100% pictures, with Parreno describing it as ‘an attempt to produce a psycho-geographical map of a subway line’. I’m not familiar with the Hammersmith & City line, but I don’t think there are any dinosaurs or aeroplanes in it (unless they are toys). I ‘read’ this book a few times to see if I could ‘get’ it, but I just didn’t. It doesn’t really work as a flip book nor as trying to imagine the pictures fitting in with a Tube journey (except in that some bit are very dark). The drawings are well done. Ultimately it was a disappointment – I appreciate the risks taken in this series, but this didn’t really pay off for me. I do like the picture of the book with mushrooms growing in it though.

http://samstillreading.wordpress.com

Although the Hammersmith & City Line was officially named in 1990, the origins of this line go back to 1864, the year after subway service began in London. In that year the Metropolitan Railway extended the Paddington to Farringdon service westward to Hammersmith. In later years the line was extended eastward, reaching its current terminus at Barking in 1902. The line shares stations with District, Circle and Metropolitan Line trains, which run just under the street surface throughout much of its route, unlike the deeper tube lines such as the Bakerloo, Piccadilly and Victoria Lines. The Hammersmith & City Line formed part of the Metropolitan Line until 1990, when it acquired its current name.

The Hammersmith & City and the Metropolitan Lines are now served by the newest London Underground trains, the S stock, which are the first fully air conditioned lines to operate in the system.

French artist and filmmaker Philippe Parreno was given the task of writing a book about the Hammersmith & City Line for Penguin's Underground series, which celebrates the 150th anniversary of the London Underground in 2013. His contribution is a collection of crudely drawn images, such as the one that appears on the cover of this book, which consists of animals, insects, people and buildings, but no trains or stations, which seem to have no connection to one another and nothing to do with the Underground in general or this line in particular. The only text is found on the cover and on one interior image at the beginning of the book. I have absolutely no idea what Parreno was trying to do here, and, more importantly, I don't understand why Penguin would have published this piece of rubbish as a book or paid Parreno to create it. A six year old child of average talent could have created a more meaningful work than this one, and would have been far cheaper to employ than Monsieur Parreno (and why was a Frenchman hired to write a book about the London Underground?). I feel sorry for anyone who bought this book without looking through it first, and those who paid more than five pence for it should be given an immediate refund. ( )