[In the following review of Chatterton, Roberts finds shortcomings in the dubious intellectual games and caricatures of Ackroyd's postmodern narrative.]

Just as Georgette Heyer may be said to have reinvented the late 18th century for several generations of modern romantics, so the poet-plagiarist Thomas Chatterton invented the mediaeval period for the early 19th-century Romantics. Finally, of course, he was exposed as a faker of texts, so now Peter Ackroyd offers this thriller-romance [Chatterton] about the quest of a modern poet-romantic to discover how and why Chatterton was able to pull the wool over his contemporaries’ eyes for as long as he did.

Georgette Heyer moved her plots along with thrilling hints of sexual ambiguity and cross-dressing; Chatterton provided nostalgic images of a perfect lost world that his fellows, struggling with the implications of the Industrial Revolution, needed to believe; and Ackroyd, for all his postmodernist sophistication about the diversity of linguistic fancy-dress that history provides as disguise, returns us, eventually, to a sweet and perhaps naive vision of the modern nuclear family, maintaining itself in the face of separation and loss. This novel demonstrates how writers and artists may lie and cheat in the interests of their art and their ambition; but, in the end, it shows us a writer’s family in which the good father (or stepfather) and the good mother go on protecting the good child. Certainly this is a myth of great contemporary potency.

The novel’s plot is as tricksy and clever as admirers of Ackroyd’s previous novel Hawksmoor could wish and, like it, depends on an investigation into the way that the past possesses, informs and alters the present. Charles Wychwood, a poet with writer’s block, discovers documents and a portrait that suggest to him that Chatterton faked his own death in order more safety to go on supplying the fake mediaeval texts for which his fantasy-hungry audience yearned. Simultaneously, we are granted vignettes of Henry Wallis painting his celebrated picture of the (supposed) death of Chatterton, using the writer George Meredith as model. Parallel to this we see the dishonesty and venery of modern London, in which ageing novelist Harriet Scrope fears exposure as a plagiarist and so plots against Charles whom she suspects has cottoned on to her guilty secret (later, she decides simply to steal his work) and in which the art gallery where Charles’ wife Vivien works as a secretary is unashamedly involved in selling forgeries.

Charles is presented as an innocent doomed by his quest for truth, his unworldliness. As his obsession with Chatterton’s secrets grows, so he is increasingly possessed by the dead poet, with tragic results. Proclaiming his belief in the validity of the dream of wholeness and beauty, the dream. Chatterton could only endorse through fakery, he comes face to face with inevitable mortality; in the end, the dream will be made incarnate by his best friend Philip’s decision to write a book about it all (a novel called Chatterton, perhaps).

Ackroyd scrupulously refuses the traditional tricks of the storyteller: to enchant us, to weave spells, to sweep us along. His purpose is sterner; he works through shifts, gaps, halts, silences. For all the earnest intellectual frolicking round questions of truth, intertextuality, plagiarism and inspiration—or perhaps because of it—this remains a curiously cold novel. Why, for example, should two women (Meredith’s wife and Miss Slimmer, a poet) who have just witnessed a fire and the near-death of a child by burning immediately engage Meredith in a discussion of illusion? All right: Ackroyd tries to eschew naturalism, the simple reproduction of surfaces, when describing the past; but he’s happy to give us his awful pastiche of Chatterton’s memoir (yes, a fake) and, when painting the present, to rely on young-fogeyish, creaking pantomime—in which old women are spiteful hags; gay men are grotesque, silly queens; a wife is little but a slavish adorer of her husband’s non-work; and waiters in an Indian restaurant serve up brown goo and talk funny. These caricatures throw into relief the purity of Ackroyd’s heterosexual heroes, fundamentally decent chaps for all their old-fashioned eccentricities. If, as Tony Tanner has brilliantly shown, the 19th-century male novel’s narrative was often driven along by questions of adultery, the 20th-century male novel seems to be equally obsessed by resultant notions of illegitimacy. Does a male author really father his own text? Or is his child really someone else’s? Ackroyd plays with uncertainty on the level of literature but can’t confront the problem squarely in terms of his modern characters: anxieties about masculinity are soothed as Vivien serves up raspberry ripple.