[In the following review, Glover offers an unfavorable assessment of The Life of Thomas More.]

It seems a long time since Peter Ackroyd published his last book, a novel about the surprising appearance of John Milton in the New World. Its single most memorable sentence would have made Sir Thomas More, the greatest of all defenders of the religion and values of pre-Reformation England, puke: “This missal,” Milton remarks with contempt during some routine persecution of a poor woman caught at her miserable devotions, “is fit only to make winding sheets for pilchards.”

Could it have been all of 18 months since those marvellously tangy words first appeared in print? At the time, the literary agent Giles Gordon likened Ackroyd’s working habits to all those planes that are banked above Heathrow waiting to descend, one every two minutes or so. They just never seem to stop coming.

And so it is with Ackroyd. He is under contract to write seven more books, which will presumably be his usual mixture of biography and fiction—that is to say, works of fictionalised biography alternating with works of biographically grounded fiction. For Ackroyd’s views of the relationship between biography and fiction are paradoxical enough to be worthy of debate by the Oxford Union. “In fiction you are obliged to tell the truth,” he once said. “In biography you make things up—it’s a highly formalised activity.”

Unfortunately in order to make things up effectively you need to know a great deal about the context within which you are fabricating. Ackroyd could engage in credible dialogue with Charles Dickens in his unusual biography of 1990 because so much of Victorian England—books, buildings, ideas, artefacts—has survived. But pre-Reformation England is a time before our time, extremely remote in its values.

The king who did for More did for the great majority of the period’s buildings and artefacts, too. It is for this reason that Ackroyd feels cramped and confined on this occasion. Although he has read widely, he does not understand enough about the feelings and the impulses that drove this late-medieval world along (and how could he?) to recreate it with his customary stylistic panache.

He seems to grope his way through More’s life like a bent man with a taper in the dark, never able to stand upright and see far enough ahead to draw his usual bold and cheeky conclusions.

The part of the book that does come to life is, not surprisingly, to do with London. More was one of London’s greatest sons, and Ackroyd, tearing up the Victorian cobbles to dig a little deeper into his favourite theme—the half-buried Matter of London—recreates for us the street life of the late-medieval capital with its masques and pageantries, and the interiors of the houses where More lived. Much of this has the daring and invention to be expected of good fiction. But in most respects the book leaves us with the feeling that this time Ackroyd might have done better to leave his subject to the historians.