[In the following review, Levenson traces the development of Ackroyd's literary preoccupations and criticizes his conservative nostalgia for English history and cultural identity as presented in English Music.]

“She walked between the leafless poplars and, when a woman crossed her path, instinctively Evangeline looked away. She looked down at the ground. So I have no connection with the world, she thought.”

—Peter Ackroyd, First Light

“‘I never know where anything comes from, Walter.’

‘Comes from, sir?’

‘Where you come from, where I come from, where all this comes from.’ And he gestured at the offices and homes beneath him. He was about to say something else but he stopped, embarrassed; and in any case he was coming to the limits of his understanding.”

—Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor

Here is where Ackroyd began, and where he still begins: with the disconnected life, the wandering soul, the anxiously floating self that knows dimly that it has been torn from some large warm body but doesn’t know why, or when. The condition pervades his work, and leads to a good, gloomy, interesting paradox: life on the margins is the universal norm. The center is an optical illusion, and those who seem to stand there, gleaming with power, only occupy another margin; beneath their aura of dominance, they shudder with the same disease. The suicidal astronomer, the melancholy anthropologist, the obsessed detective, the hysterical waiter, the manic civil servant—no one knows how to live.

For a decade now Ackroyd has been a writer of fiction, and when he wasn’t producing one of his six novels, he was writing biographies (one on T. S. Eliot, one the massive Dickens), or reviewing books, or giving interviews. The word count alone is breathtaking. Now with English Music a ten-year process appears to have run its course. Ackroyd hasn’t just produced another novel; he has arrived somewhere, and it’s suddenly possible to see the arc he has traveled.

Possible, for instance, to see the extent to which Eliot and Dickens were more than just big salable biographical subjects for the’80s: they were major imaginative resources for Ackroyd, two sharply contrasting angles of vision that gave him more than one eye to look through. From Eliot he absorbed a quick sensitivity to spiritual waste, an alertness to the death in life that too easily passes for human existence. From Dickens he took quite another thing, an endless delight in carnival, the love of “the bright surfaces and the powerful stories, the vivid unnatural colors,” the passion for energy even in, maybe especially in, its most grotesque forms. Where Eliot saw a wasted hollow self, Dickens found a frantically leaping puppet; and now Ackroyd sees both. Disease and energy—this potent compound is what he has drawn from his two large predecessors and what has given him his fertile oddity. Ackroyd has recognized like few others the theatricality of the crippled soul, the campy excess of spiritual desperation.

Not surprisingly, within the wide and generous grasp of postmodernism, Ackroyd has been easy to hug. He tells his stories of the broken life not in existentialist gray, but in the bright yellows and blues of the Serious Goof. He has parodied and pastiched with the best of them; he has wiggled and winked. After, he came back to his beloved London from two years of graduate study at Yale in the early’70s, he issued a manifesto, Notes for a New Culture, and to read it now is to marvel at how quickly Ackroyd recognized the coming of a new crusade.

The force of his sharp polemic was that English national culture had failed. For centuries, it had ignored the advanced current of European ideas that had made a modernist revolution possible, and now that the fuller reaches of the revolution had been achieved, the poverty of England was painfully visible. It had remained within the boundaries of tired humanist values—“realism,” “tradition,” “the self”—long past their obsolescence. All over the Continent, poets and philosophers had seen “the death of Man” and the rebirth of a free and independent language that did not serve Man. Meanwhile, the benighted English clung to a belief in the humanizing power of art, ignoring Mallarmé’s insight that literature does not exist for the social good, that on the contrary, “Everything exists to end in a Book.”

In 1982 Ackroyd began a career as a novelist, no doubt with his Notes for a New Culture spread open on his lap. His first novel, The Great Fire of London, gave us a young woman possessed by Dickens’s Little Dorrit, which uproots her from her clerkly routines and urges her to a violent destiny. Hawksmoor (1985) imagines murderous forces stretching through time, linking a Satanic seventeenth-century architect and a fast disintegrating modern detective who are bound by the geography of London and the design of its churches. Chatterton (1987) meditates on the forgeries of the early-dying eighteenth-century boy poet and expands into a comic subversion of the boundaries between the fake and the genuine. In their separate ways these works all rely on the now familiar post-modernist goad: Text, not Sex, is the power that drives lives, and what we call the real is merely the latest successful invention of a world.

They are quick, curious, kinky and original things, these novels, which nevertheless offer easy handles to those who sort literature for a living. The only academic article on Ackroyd appeared just a few months ago and predictably tied a neat postmodernist bow around its package. But the essay has appeared just in time to be obsolete: Ackroyd is up to something else now, something that forces us not only to revise our view of his career, but also to think harder about the commonplaces of postmodernism.

In the early sections of English Music a spiritualist named Clement Harcombe gathers around him a circle of broken lives who turn to him to inspire belief. This he pompously does. But then in a bleak moment, Harcombe admits to his son, “Everyone’s life is like that, Tim. Frail. Always very frail. … It takes only one accident, one crisis … and everything is torn away. The whole edifice collapses, and there is nothing beneath our feet any more. That’s when we start falling.” And by “we,” Ackroyd means us.

For a time, in his early work, he saw no end to the anguish of living without foundations—no end beyond a last acrobatic leap into the abyss. In The Great Fire of London, or in The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), he gave nothing more consoling than the splendid flare at the moment of extinction when some twisted soul burns out of its suffering. There was nothing to hope for, nothing beyond a camp nihilism that grins in the flames.

Then at some point, difficult to fix precisely, Ackroyd began writing his way into new convictions. The earlier insight, dripping with comic juices, that we are rudely coerced by scripts from the dead past, gave way to the thought that those scripts may be the best things we have. We late moderns may be the living dead, but we needn’t surrender all hope: the true dead are all around us. If only we can learn to meet them, to acknowledge them, to weave ourselves into a compact with them, then we may all come alive together.

On the facades of London buildings, found usually between door and window, blue plaques mark the fact that here a politician schemed, a writer composed, a scientist pondered, a hospital stood, a prison incarcerated. You simply can’t overestimate how excited Ackroyd grows at the thought that on that very spot Johnson talked or Blake dreamed. Dickens walked here. More than any infatuated tourist can imagine, Ackroyd now nourishes his writing on the excited recognition that to move through London is to collide at every moment with benevolent ghosts asking nothing more than to haunt us back to life.

As his career has gone on, he has more than indulged, he has passionately succumbed to his fascination with the past—its distance, its presence. “My general obsession with the past,” Ackroyd has said, “I don’t understand it; it just suddenly started happening.” In English Music Clement Harcombe surely speaks for his author when he says that our world is “dominated by the dead. By the spirits of the past.” For Ackroyd the clearest sign of our crisis is the failure to acknowledge this fact, the failure to acknowledge our neighbors, the ghosts. In First Light (1989) the shattered bureaucrat Evangeline Tupper, “thought of her own parents, and their parents before them; they were strangers to her. But somehow worse than strangers. Somehow they were her enemies.” When the past is alien and the continuity of generations broken, then—thinks Ackroyd—you arrive at the pretty pass where we find ourselves. English Music means to show the way home.

In the years after the First World War, the Harcombes, father and son, Clement and Timothy, perform spiritual exercises in a seedy theater in the East End of London. With his hand on the boy’s head, the elder Harcombe summons energy from beyond the grave and heals the wounded living. Nervous seizures disappear; depression is lifted; back pain is relieved. Timothy, who sees the visible evidence, never doubts his father’s power. But when the boy leaves London, taken to the country to be raised by his dead mother’s parents, the father’s power fades. He deserts the circle of his dependents and gives up his spiritualism. Was it Timothy then who held the charm that he attributed to the charismatic father?

Yes—and no. Ackroyd builds this plot contrivance in order to write an allegory of English tradition. Son and father separate, reunite, quarrel, confess, and reconcile, and in their changing relations the novel renders the marriage of past and present. A visionary gift passes between the generations, but, as Ackroyd is at great pains to suggest, the gift is not something any one individual can hold; it lies in the act of inheritance itself. The visionary charge resides in the activity of generational passage—the giving not the gift. Climactically, Timothy realizes that “it seemed such an abstract category; inheritance, and yet it glowed with all the power of the world.”

The showy technical maneuver in the novel is to alternate present-tense chapters in young Timothy’s story—his parting and then his reunion with his father, his discovery of friendship, his sexual awakening, his spiritual revelation—with chapters in which he loses ordinary consciousness and walks inside the great imaginative works of the past. The first time this happens he finds himself inside a bizarre composite landscape, half Alice in Wonderland, half The Pilgrim’s Progress. The second time he falls into Great Expectations, where he encounters both Dickens and his characters. Then Robinson Crusoe on his island, William Hogarth and his engravings, Thomas Malory and Merlin—and so on.

Partly, this device belongs to a frankly visionary project that Ackroyd has been approaching for years. “The mystery of time, and how to journey from time into eternity”—this is the way English Music describes the goal. The task is to escape the cycles of futility in our fallen world and to glimpse the eternal truth. But very notably Ackroyd offers no religious perception as the guarantor, of the vision; he seeks the vision without the belief. In place of faith English Music offers the imagination, and in place of God, the past. On this grand subject Timothy’s friend Edward quotes an aptly titled book called The Secrets of the Fallen World:

Past acts or past traditions are not necessarily lost in time, therefore, because they can be re-created in the imagination; not relived as part of the endless cycle of the generations but restored in their absolute and unchanging essence. Thus do they become part of that eternal present through which the imagination lives. Similarly the evidence of past civilizations, of past lives, can be renewed and enter that state of permanent reality which the imagination bestows upon it.

But which past, and whose past? The answer is unequivocal: the English past, that’s whose. When they arrive home from a hard night’s spiritualism, Timothy and his father sit and eat and chat. They never talk about their work directly:

Instead we discussed what he used to call “English music,” by which he meant not only music itself but also English history, English literature, and English painting. With him one subject always led to another and he would break off from a discussion of William Byrd or Henry Purcell in order to tell me about Tennyson and Browning; he would turn from the work of Samuel Johnson to the painting of Thomas Gains-borough, from pavanes and galliards to odes and sonnets, from the London of Daniel Defoe to the London of Charles Dickens. And in my imagination, as he talked, all these things comprised one world which I believed to be still living—even in this small room where we sat.

That there is an English music, that it shows itself in every cultural domain, that it sings as clearly through English philosophy as it does in English poetry—on this theme the novel is relentlessly lyrical. But back at the start of his career Ackroyd had hummed a different tune. In The Great Fire of London he savaged the Rule Britannia complacency of an unctuous bureaucrat from the Film Finance Board, Sir Frederick Lustlambert. With freezing irony he gave Sir Frederick’s prideful image of “a great English classic … being filmed in this country, with our superb reservoir of English actors, our pool of English technicians.” Now ten years later, the Englishness of the English—“the one true shape of Britain”—is Ackroyd’s unrelievedly cherished motif. In English Music William Hogarth rises from the grave and earnestly testifies that “my own desire of excellence impelled me to fix my attention upon English life: English nature was to be my subject, and English people to be my audience.” Here at the end of his decade, Ackroyd can chant the word “England”—“Of time. Of continuity. Of England”—without irony, and nearly without cease.

So the parade of cultural masterworks in English Music is more than the latest Romantic imagination-cult. It is an eye-catching act in the politics of culture, a fervent gesture of literary nationalism, a recent extravagant contribution to the revival of national identities. In these bad days our picture of nationalism is darkly blotted with images of bloody ethnic war. But it would be dangerous to forget that the fetish of Nation shows itself in many less overtly violent ways. Ackroyd has come to some hard conclusions that he unshrinkingly records. We are lost lonely souls; only the imagination can save us; and it can save us only by reanimating a national past.

“At moments of great change,” reflects Timothy, “it is customary to return to the scenes of an earlier life.” He means merely to be indicating the strength of his own nostalgia, but he might well be describing the present crisis of Europe. In the face of both the Maastricht treaty for a federal Europe and the erupting claims of rival ethnicities, Ackroyd’s instinct, like many another, is to recall (or to imagine) a pure nation that was. When the British tabloid The Sun blazed its famous anti-Europe headline, UP YOURS DELORS, it was scarcely more resolute in its refusal of a transnational, multicultural future than English Music. At one point the elder Harcombe meditates on “the spirits of a nation” and observes, “You know when you are in England, don’t you? How different it is from the atmosphere of France, and how different France is from Germany? We might even call this the spirit of the past. The spirit of time. It is part of us, you see.”

The book goes on like this, with no particular subtlety but with the doggedness of a mind that has grown impatient with a love of the subtle. The English, French and German are different and inassimilable—Ackroyd takes this as brute fact. He wants nothing of Euro-culture: he acknowledges no such thing. But it won’t help to get sniffy and to call this a low provincialism, pabulum for the right; too many left cosmopolitans have also felt the need to phone home. For all the cranky overinsistence of the book, English Music registers a condition worth marking: that identity develops inside a language, which unfolds inside a tradition, which bears the ancient traces of nation. Whatever happens in Europe or anywhere else, it will be good to remember that the entrenchments of consciousness cannot simply be willed away.

“You have inherited all that you possess”—this insidious half-truth (“all”!) shows just how far Ackroyd is willing to go. For him there can be no point in pursuing a multinational community, a new Europe, because you can never invent a community, you can only inherit one. In pressing this theme, English Music takes its most disagreeable turn and threatens to sink beneath a nationalism into a racialism. Toward the end of the book, Timothy wonders what he had “inherited from all of these people, from previous fathers and sons,” and once the test of inheritance becomes a matter of fathers and sons, then it is easy to see how nation can transmute to race. The critic John Barrell has already noticed that given the novel’s setting in the East End of London in the 1920s, the absence of Jews is notable—notable, yes, but perfectly predictable. It follows swiftly from the view of English imagination as its own pool of literary genes, separate from any other pool, including the pool of women, who appear as a strange race of their own. The novel is unabashedly masculinist. Women are no more than carriers of male imagination; when it comes to visionary inheritance, a King bequeaths a throne to a Prince.

Impurity had once been Ackroyd’s greatest virtue, his jaunty willingness to combine literary speech with T.V. talk, to mix up the tacky with the solemn, to let his gays and lesbians camp up the prose with stagy verbal struts. In those days no titter was too silly for his form of seriousness. But now the sex and the speech have straightened out, and as English Music unfolds, the vestiges of play drop aside, leaving the sentimental lyric of England for the English, a grand nation preserved by its artists, musicians and writers—all this from a man who began his career by mocking the provincial stupidities of his home island.

As the culture heroes of England make their stately parade through the novel—Chaucer and Shakespeare, Malory and Milton, Constable and Keats, Turner and Tennyson—they become at last a gloomy procession, because they lose their distinguishing marks. In Ackroyd’s theory of nationhood, nothing deep ever changes: English genius has only one identity behind its many masks. As a feeble masquerade of Blake puts it:

So men pass on but the nation remains permanent for ever.
All things acted on this island are in Chaucer’s verses
And every age renews its power from his winged words.
As one age falls another rises, different to mortal sight,
But in substance ever the same.

Or as Timothy elsewhere says of English Music: “The instruments may alter and the form may vary but the spirit seems always to remain the same.”

National greatness issues from a changeless identity, and one can’t help but think; how sad. How sad, and finally how banal, that the yearning to belong must imply an endless return of the same sweet song. In the tedium of the book’s pyrotechnics—one weakly impersonated genius after another—lurks a lesson for certain high-shouldered defenders of the literary canon who claim that greatness is good enough, and that monuments alone can feed a culture’s need. Ackroyd inadvertently shows just how closed and airless the history of the great can be, when so little more is said than that they were great, and still are great, and isn’t that great?

The politics of postmodernism show their troubling intricacy in the case of Ackroyd. The assault on the absolute—Absolute Reality, Absolute Truth and all their close cousins—has been taken to carry a progressive social charge: the “tyranny” of one truth to which all texts must correspond yields to the “democracy” of many versions of many truths. But Ackroyd’s example points up the hollowness of the political analogy. Ackroyd is the Tory postmodernist: now we know that there can be such a thing. He still regards the Text as not the reflection but the source of experience. He still sees “reality” as an artifact of the imagination. He still suggests that the “truest Plagiarism is the truest Poetry.” And yet these contemporary maneuvers, so often held up as acts of subversion and liberation, are here put in the service of a Tory nostalgia. Ackroyd may croon the fashionable tune, “There is nothing outside the Text,” but he now adds the chorus, “And only the best English Texts will do.”

All truths may be relative, but some are closer relatives than others. Some beliefs live so near at hand that in times of instability they serve as a place of rest even for the campiest skeptic. English Music is a dull book by a lively writer, and for what it most broadly implies, it is as significant as a dull book can get. Its nationalism has nothing of blood and guts; it appears rather as a shelter for a rarefied sensibility that has finally abandoned the desire to pass from identity to difference. But its high literary tone cannot mute the low political bass, the soft, ominous sound of settling dust.