[In the following review of English Music, Taylor finds irritating shortcomings in Ackroyd's didacticism and antiquarianism, but declines to pass final judgment on the novel.]

We read Peter Ackroyd’s fiction in rather the same way that the Victorian critic George Saintsbury read Anatole France: to find out what Peter Ackroyd has been reading. As one dense and allusive novel gives way to another, that task has become progressively more arduous.

The Great Fire of London and The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, the early novels, were easy ones: a bit of Dickens, a very large amount of Wilde, a serious interest in all the spangled fakery that makes modern novels truly modern. By the time of Hawksmoor, the extent of Ackroyd’s fossicking in the British Museum reading-room could only be guessed at, but even this mixture of late Stuart pastiche and modern detective story possessed a distinctive life of its own. Only in First Light, with its nods to the Hardy of The Woodlanders and Two on a Tower, and its mannered dialogue, was the reader pulled up short by the sensation of a book that seemed largely written by somebody else.

“Research”, of course, is the touchstone of the modern novel, embraced with equal enthusiasm by the filler of the W H Smith dump-bin and the potential winner of the Booker Prize. To Shirley Conran a team of dutiful assistants and Keesing’s Contemporary Archives; to Ackroyd the BM’s 18th-century pamphlet collection and a fertile imagination. English Music is surely the climax of this magpie’s approach to literary composition: a treatise on themes and continuities in English culture masquerading as a novel, with all the resolute didacticism that implies.

The historical grounding of Timothy Harcombe, its juvenile lead, is quite as marked as that of Ackroyd’s other heroes: in fact, the preface reveals him to have been inspired by the Victorian medium, Daniel Home, “and the short account of his son in Incidents of My Life”. One half of the novel—much the better—traces his desultory childhood progress: helping his widowed father at spiritualist meetings in the early 1920s (young Timothy has powerful psychic powers); being packed off to stay with his grandparents in the country; returning to witness his dad’s decline (he hits the bottle and ends up as a circus musician); settling down into a long, low-key existence in the farmhouse his grandparents leave to him.

This meandering trajectory is no more than a framework for the main topic of the book—the series of visions experienced by Timothy throughout his early life, and their relation to national culture. A wordy encounter with Alice and some characters from The Pilgrim’s Progress; a chat with Dickens; a saunter with Hogarth along Gin Lane; Blake, Byrd and Defoe popping up to recite ersatz poetry, lecture him on the techniques of early music, or simply confound him with gnomic aphorisms. Some responsibility for his receptiveness to these visitations, one assumes, comes from his schoolmaster, Mr Armitage. “Don’t you think he had a vision?” Timothy’s school friend Campion (spot that one?) inquires. “Of what exactly?” “I don’t know. Of life. Of continuity. Of England.”

Ackroyd’s theories on the singularity of English culture have had several airings in the press of late. Learned and partial theories they are, too, notably in their insistence on a suppressed Catholic tradition. To set them down in a volume entitled An Exploration of Englishness would be one thing. To put them to work, amid much gleeful obfuscation, as the armature of a novel is to cancel out their imaginative effects with sheer reader irritation.

This is not only a result of the endless lecturing—and the section on Byrd is literally unreadable, to my mind—but the consequence of Ackroyd’s historical vision, which occasionally slides towards antiquarianism of the fussy, confidential, high-Victorian sort. The volley of 18th-century obscenities that enlivens the Hogarth encounter, for example, is simply obtrusive. It is put there merely to advertise Ackroyd’s airy familiarity with his sources.

Labouring beneath the weight of ulterior motive, English Music ends up oddly similar to one of those Victorian novels that are not really novels but philosophical juggernauts, like W H Mallock’s The New Republic. There are, as you might anticipate, some good bits by way of compensation. In writing about London, Ackroyd’s touch is as sure as ever, and his interest in spiritualism, if not in the same league as a Dickens or even a Powell, is always engrossing.

A final judgment hangs out of reach. I can just about remember the slashing notices with which Ackroyd made his name in the mid-1970s; a youthful literary editor of the Spectator. It seems a safe bet that the author’s younger self would have had particular fun with English Music.