[In the following review, Firchow offers a positive assessment of Chatterton.]

Peter Ackroyd is rapidly becoming the next novelist to watch. One sign of his newly acquired status is the appearance of Chatterton, his third novel, in a plush paperback edition featuring gushing blurbs from the New York Times, Time, and other watched places. This event has taken place more than a year after the book’s first publication in hardback and at about the same time as his most recent novel, First Light, is being hailed in triumph from London to New York to Sydney and beyond.

What is the secret of such success? Aside from the fact that Ackroyd writes well, with tremendous verve and wit, it is probably due to his complex yet oddly accessible intertextuality. The sometime biographer of T. S. Eliot has clearly gone to school with the master. Hence, all the yuppies who liked The Name of the Rose and who only pretended to like The French Lieutenant’s Woman will undoubtedly enjoy Chatterton—that is, if they haven’t already—for Ackroyd not only fuses semantic with moral riddles as Eco does, but also has the advantage of knowing how to write. Although Fowles admittedly writes well, he is rarely able to crack a smile, either for himself or his reader, whereas Ackroyd wears an almost perpetual ironic or satiric grin.

Chatterton is a multilevel construction. The main floor is located in the twentieth century, with a basement leading into the nineteenth and a subbasement into the eighteenth. There is also a small staircase at one end, ascending into eternity. Not surprisingly, the whole place is situated not far from postmodernist magic-realism land. As for the inhabitants, not only are there a couple of novelists within the novel, but there are also at least three poets and a similar number of painters. (There is lots of room here, as one can see.) At the center, which on the whole manages to hold, is the figure of Chatterton himself, as reflected chiefly in paintings by Harry Wallis, completed in 1856, with George Meredith as his model, and in another by “George Stead,” with the fifty-year-old Chatterton as model. (Chatterton, famous for his forged “medieval” poems, was born in 1752 and died in 1770.) Chatterton also puts in a couple of cameo appearances himself, as do Meredith and Wallis. The main plot, however, involves the efforts of a group of contemporary Londoners, and principally those of the poet manqué Charles Wychwood, to discover the “facts” concerning Chatterton’s real or faked suicide. This is the mystery (as in “intriguing literary mystery”), which grows ever more mysterious as Chatterton’s picture begins to exercise an increasingly baleful influence on the protagonist. One remembers here Ackroyd’s Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, to which the novel sometimes appears to constitute a codicil.

The central locus, then, is the hall of mirrors—temporal, literary, esthetic, metaphysical. It’s all an hallusion, as it were. Wherever we look we see counterfeit or real, literary or historical, humorous or serious faces staring back at us. Is this Chatterton? Meredith? Wilde? Ackroyd? Truth? The solution of the mystery? Hard to say, and in the end perhaps we don’t really care. It’s fun though.