Word: ackroyd
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Ambition and false identity, suicide and posthumous fame: these are the ingredients of high romance, and it is no wonder that investigators periodically ransack the material of Chatterton's brief career. The latest is Briton Peter Ackroyd, 38, biographer of T.S. Eliot and a novelist who specializes in the blending of history and imagination. In Hawksmoor he shuttled between the 18th century and the present. Chatterton ventures deeper ! into the time warp. It unfolds in contemporary England, concludes in the late 1700s and dallies in the Victorian epoch when an artist named Henry Wallis painted a dramatic portrait...
This tumult of passion, literature and coincidence belongs in the Dickensian tradition, and so does Ackroyd. The protagonist of his crowded and exuberant novel is another cursed poet, Charles Wychwood. One afternoon he comes across an old painting showing the marvellous boy as a middle-aged man. Curious, he begins to pore over some obscure manuscripts. They suggest that Chatterton faked his early death, then continued to write more verse under more assumed names, among them William Blake and Thomas Gray. "The greatest plagiarist in history?" inquires a colleague. "No!" Wychwood argues. "He was the greatest poet in history...
...1920s and 1930s are remembered as a golden age for mysteries, that era's exemplar, Agatha Christie, and most of her contemporaries had no gift for taking readers on a journey into another culture or milieu. The fun lay chiefly in guessing, if one cared, who killed Roger Ackroyd. Nowadays, Christie's kind of puzzle, based on clues larded into the text, has largely given way to a more novelistic brand of mystery, in which the solution may not matter that much to either the writer or the reader. The motive for a crime is more likely to be psychological...
Unsatisfying as this may be for armchair detectives, it preserves the phantasmagoric mood essential to Hawksmoor's impact. Ackroyd, 36, a versatile English writer whose biography of T.S. Eliot was widely praised two years ago, has a gift for historical pastiche. His 18th century is a battleground where the rational temper of the modern world, championed by Wren, contends with the medieval occultism embraced by Dyer...
...whores and beggars, its hordes of homeless, its "Wilderness of dirty rotten Sheds, allways tumbling or takeing Fire, with winding crooked passages, lakes of Mire and rills of stinking Mud, as befits the smokey grove of Moloch." In the eerie interplay between the earlier age and our own, Ackroyd has fashioned a fictional architecture that is vivid, provocative and as clever as, well, the devil...