The Modern Novel

Biography

Peter Ackroyd is a distinguished biographer – he has written biographies of Blake, Dickens, Eliot and Pound. This might even be his forte. His novels are generally similar in style – they are usually set in London, involve some mystery and mix the past with the present, with the past usually having a major and often fatal effect on the present. As can be seen from the titles, many of his novels are peopled with actual historical characters. All his novels can be read – with much enjoyment – as gloomy, historical mysteries where the past and present intertwine. Clearly, for Ackroyd, the past cannot be separated from the present. Not only does the present not stand alone, resting on the past, but the past never fully goes away but comes back into the present in often unpredictable ways.

While virtually all of his novels are superbly written and thoroughly enjoyable, I do, at times, find that there is something lacking, as though he seems unable to penetrate beyond this theme and the idea of the lives of his characters (real and fictitious) intertwining. The one exception is his undoubted masterpiece, English Music. This novel, partially through real characters, looks into the theme of what is Englishness in a manner not found in most 20th century English novels. It also examines the role of art in the human spirit. It is clearly one of the foremost post-War English novels.

Peter Ackroyd was born in 1949 in East Acton, Middlesex. He was brought up by his mother, as his father had left the family home when he was very young. He studied English at Clare College, Cambridge, where he took a double first. He then became a Mellon Fellow at Yale University, where he wrote Notes for a New Culture: An Essay on Modernism. He worked for the Spectator,before coming a full-time writer. He then became a book reviewer for The Times.

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