SOURCE: “Collapsophe,” in The New Republic, March 20, 2000, pp. 31-4.

[In the following review, Green offers an extended negative evaluation of The Plato Papers and comments unfavorably on Ackroyd's postmodern aesthetic.]

I.

What drives anyone to speculate, or, worse, to prophesy, about the future? Curiosity, and an interest in self-preservation: it isn't hard to see why Delphi commanded such a market for so long. And in the longer view, there is always the fun of seeing the guesses confirmed or refuted. Jules Verne got aviation more or less right, and H. G. Wells was depressingly accurate about the atom bomb; but Arnold Toynbee's Study of History remains remarkable mainly for having got its argument so wrong on such a massive scale, and Orwell's bleak forecast of the future as a boot stamping on a human face forever never envisaged the Soviet monolith's ignominious collapse less than a decade after 1984.

Maybe it is the impossibility of being proved wrong that elicits predictions aimed centuries, or even millennia, into the future; but there is also that ever-present urge to escape the less-than-ideal realities of the here-and-now. Hence also the notion of Utopia, the supposedly perfect community that, as its punning name reminds us, is situated nowhere. Not that its two most famous proponents, Plato and Thomas More—with both of whom Peter Ackroyd shows more than a nodding acquaintance—are much calculated to appeal today. Plato's Republic, and certainly his Laws, offers a nightmarish picture of intellectual totalitarianism, complete with eugenics, slavery, censorship of art and literature, and communal ownership of all goods, women included. More's Utopia was similarly communistic: no private property, civic mess-halls, and ferocious penalties for sexual offenses. Six hours of manual work a day was mandatory; education and medical services were free. It sounds not unlike Fidel Castro's Cuba.

A cynic might say that there was not much to choose between such blueprints for mankind and the raging modern dystopias of Zamyatin, Huxley (Ape and Essence rather than Brave New World), and Orwell's Animal Farm. Small wonder that in this nuclear age the doomsayers have dominated the field. But this same futurology also produced, ever since Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men (1930), a strong tendency towards ethical idealism and, sometimes, cosmic mysticism: the urge to redesign the human race, and predict a new sort of humanity, to sweep away our accumulation of grubby and demeaning mistakes, and make a completely fresh start. Indeed, it was in much the same spirit that Plato, surveying the murderous excesses of both oligarchs and democrats in his famous Seventh Letter, began moving towards a Theory of Forms or Ideas. What he envisaged was the notion of an absolute truth, an ideal of reality that all mundane phenomena no more than approximated. In spiritually barren times, this dream of the Logos becomes immensely attractive, as something above and outside the seemingly meaningless fragmentation of life as it is commonly lived.

Now comes Peter Ackroyd, fresh from his biography of Thomas More, with The Plato Papers: A Prophecy. Set in or about the year 3700 C.E., this short fiction reaches America garlanded with hyperbolic tributes (“a timeless literary masterpiece” and so on) from London. Sounds important, doesn't it? So what kind of seer is Ackroyd? What does he vouchsafe about the future of the race?

II.

We begin with a short time-chart, which raises many questions but answers none. The period between c. 3500 B.C. and c. 300 B.C. (this is Ackroyd's happy Christian usage: no B.C.E. or C.E. for him) was the “Age of Orpheus.” Orpheus, you will recall, was the rather elusive mythical figure whose lyre-playing had the ability to move wild beasts, trees, and rocks, and who made a descent into Hades to rescue his wife Eurydice (but looked back at her on their way out, thus breaking the spell and losing her). Orpheus met his death at the hands of wild Thracian women. Incensed at his introduction of homosexuality into their country, they tore off his head, which travelled, still singing, “down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore,” as Milton put it in Lycidas. So which aspect of Orpheus, one asks oneself, is supposed to characterize Ackroyd's huge “Age of Orpheus,” stretching from the mists of neolithic Greece down to the aftermath of the battle of Ipsus in 301? Enchantment and magic? Stupid egotism? Gay pride going before a fall? What do Cycladic islanders of the third millennium B.C.E. have in common with the first generation of Alexander's Successors, those wolfish generals who sliced up his empire like a Saturday-night pizza? Ackroyd does not say.

His second world-historical span, from c. 300 B.C. to c. A.D. 1500, is a tad clearer. This is the Age of the Apostles. They stop short just before Wyclif, Henry VIII, and the Reformation, which offers a good clue to Ackroyd's sympathies; but they also start early in the Hellenistic era, and this suggests that our author is well aware of the various salvationist and eschatological movements (some of them, incidentally, long before 300 B.C.E.) that offer students of the period the odd sense of coming events casting shadows. From Empedocles, the traveling shaman and self-styled “immortal god” offering prophecies and healing, to the slave-magician (and, later, revolutionary leader) Eunus, mockingly bidden by his master's guests to “remember them when he came into his kingdom,” the pre-Christian Hellenic world has always offered a powerful sense of deja vu. Classics professors have been known to use this anticipatory evidence to tease their born-again students; and something tells me that Ackroyd, too, has his own agenda for it.

His third period, from c. A.D. 1500 to c. A.D. 2300, he calls the Age of Mouldwarp. “Mouldwarp” is not an expressive neologism coined by Ackroyd. The word has been around for centuries, and it rates an enlightening entry in the Oxford English Dictionary. Its basic meaning (in an astonishing variety of spellings) is “mole,” with the stress both literal and metaphorical on the mole's two best-known characteristics: blindness and subterranean burrowing. As early as 1380, the word was being used by religious polemicists: Wyclif attacked “thes blynde moldewerpis, evere wrotyng [rooting] in the erthe aboute erthely muk,” and in 1607 one cleric sermonized that “they begin their works with a mine underground (Romish pioneers, Antichristian molewarps).” For Ackroyd, the whole period from the Reformation through the Enlightenment to today and beyond is the Age of Mouldwarp. Get it? We can't say that we haven't been warned about his view of modernity or his view of the Protestant ethic.

This, of course, is where the prophesying begins. From c. A.D. 2300 till c. A.D. 3400, according to Ackroyd, comes the tantalizing Age of Witspell. This term, in contrast to Mouldwarp, does appear to be a neologism, coined on the analogy of such existing terms as “witworm” (a persistent humorist) or “witrack” (the knack, as the OED happily puts it, of “eliciting speech by wit as a rack elicits confession.”) Witspell, then: the magic of wit? A period dominated by wit? The era ends, in any case, some three hundred years ahead of The Present, which is c. A.D. 3700; and before we are pitched into his narrative, Ackroyd offers us a further series of clues in the form of quotations from various fictional titles. The reader's instinct is to skip these and to cut to the chase: an unwise move, since we have here some characteristically obscure clues to what has been going on between Now and Then, and in the fog of Ackroyd's narrative we need all the help we can get.

We begin in 2030, with one Ronald Corvo (Ackroyd has a weakness for jokey and allusive names), in his treatise A New Theory of the Earth, meditating on how, “in this new age of universal and instantaneous communication,” the planet Earth might look “to distant observers. It must seem to shimmer in a state of continued excited activity.” That is the last recognizable glimpse that we get, so make the most of it. By 2299, Joseph P. can enter in his diary: “All fallen dark and quiet, all gone down. Collapsophe.” This picture (post-atomic? what?) is reinforced by the next extract, from a London hymn dated 2302: “We who survive, we scoured ones, in depths of dark dismay, call out of the night of our world, gone as we knew it, as we know it.” Two years later, “slivers of light” begin to appear, “riding the waves of darkness.” For 2310, we get a snippet from the preamble of a historian, announcing that “the world of science had collapsed, but the divine consciousness of humanity had not yet asserted itself.” The preamble parodies those of Herodotus and Thucydides. The historian's name is Myander, the termination presumably being cognate with Alexander and other similar masculine forms, but the historian reveals herself as a woman. This discrepancy proves symptomatic.

Forty years later, in 2350, something really has happened. The positively Byzantine proclamation—“The holy city, restored. Ourselves, revived”—at first suggested to me that Ackroyd had been reading too much Yeats. But the situation is in fact more bizarre than Yeats at his Blavatsky-inspired worst. Less than half a century on, in 2998, we get a clipping from The London Intelligencer suggesting that areas of the earth can directly, and consciously, affect their occupants: “This city, for example, is not indifferent to the joys or sufferings of its inhabitants.” Not Yeats, then, but a kind of bastard degenerate Stoicism.

Also something to do with the components of a new, restored light. Jump another four hundred years, to 3399, and we have a letter from Popcorn (see above) to Mellitus (more pseudo-classicism) remarking upon “the glorious restoration of human light, and the joy of living on the verge of a new age.” What new age, we want to know? And what is human about that light? Well, Popcorn is “beginning to see greatness and munificence erected” all around him, though in what form we are not told: the strike-rate of abstractions in this text is exceptionally high. And what are his fellow-citizens up to? According to Popcorn, “with wonderful zeal” they “have tried to revive and emulate the labours of distant antiquity,” for all the world as though they were scholars in the great library of Hellenistic Alexandria. “When asked why they are engaged on this pursuit, they reply ‘Why not? What else is there to do?’ This is our new spirit!” Beats me.

A century or so passes, and we get another proclamation: “The city bears us. The city loves its burden. Nurture it in return. Do not leave its bounds.” The quasi-Stoic notion of a world-soul is still going strong, with what sounds like a dab of sentimental Marxism thrown in. On now to the year 3640, and one of the apothegms coined by the “guardian of London,” who is named Restituta: “In returning to the origin of all things, we meet our destiny. Do you see our doubles, passing by us weeping? This is the nature of our world.” Whatever else may have changed, political aphorisms clearly have not: this specimen is as windily Delphic as any Thought of Chairman Mao.

So, in a state of considerable puzzlement, we reach our final citation, which is dated 3705 and ascribed to the anonymous author of, guess what, The Plato Papers. This proem promises more than it delivers. The intention is “to conjure up a likeness of Plato, the great orator of London.” Up to a point, the promise is fulfilled; but we are given a reference to his “unhappily brief life” without any subsequent discussion of, or reference to, his death, as well as to “a cruel superstition” that “excercised boundless domination over [his] most elevated and benevolent mind.” For the life of me, I cannot figure out what that is supposed to have been. There are also enigmatic allusions to “the conventions of spherical drama” and “the pictures of parishioners lit upon the Wall of our great and glorious city,” to remind us that Plato's London isn't exactly that of Tony Blair. But from this point on, we are on our own.

III.

The first thing one notices about Ackroyd's future is the way it keeps harping on the remote past. Not only is the London orator called Plato, but our first introduction to the world of 3705 C.E. is by way of a dramatic set-piece clearly modelled on the typical opening of a Platonic dialogue, as it might be the Phaedrus, Symposium, or Theaetetus. The speakers are Sparkler and Sidonia; and they refer to a friend called Madrigal. Is Sidonia descended from a long line of Spanish aristocrats? Does Madrigal have as his distant ancestor the transsexual landlady in Tales of the City? Even if the answer is yes (which I doubt), is there any point to any of this? All that these cute names achieve (and there are quite a few more) is to irritate the reader, who has more than enough aggravation already.

For a start, the London that these characters inhabit sounds not at all futuristic, but rather like the pre-medieval phantasmagoria that was drawn so memorably by David Jones in The Anathemata in 1952. The Fleet river is there to be crossed (later we find references to Lud's Hill and archers). There is a city wall (with multiple gates, at each of which the orator must speak), a white chapel, a market. There is talk of celebrating the feast of Gog. Moreover, Ackroyd keeps skewing his classical references. Any reader of Plato will see at once that the person to whom Ackroyd is really alluding is not Plato, but rather Plato's Socrates. Anyway, Plato must be turning in his grave to have his name given to, of all low occupations, an orator. Also, a Greek orator never wore a mask: leave that to the even lower profession of actor. So what is going on here? Just the biggest, flattest, most elaborate, and by miles the unfunniest academic joke ever unloaded on a gullible public.

Sparkler and Sidonia provide a kind of trailer of Plato's discourse “On the Condition of Past Ages.” Their tidbits tell us as much about their own world as about the past, and geophysically stop us in our tracks. Sidonia says: “There was a period when our ancestors believed that they inhabited a world which revolved around a sun … They had been told that they lived upon a spherical planet, moving through some kind of infinite space.” Cries of astonished incredulity. This, of course, was the deluded Age of Mouldwarp, when (Sidonia again) people were much smaller, with tiny heads and pinpoint eyes. So we are back with the science-trashing mystics, and all we have to do now is figure out whether Ackroyd is backing them or setting them up. (I have to confess that by the end I didn't care all that much which it was; but as we will see, it matters.)

A hint of Ackroyd's technique, and attitude, emerges from a tell-tale quoted remark of Plato's: “Do you know that in the end they believed themselves to be covered by a great net or web?” Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. What we are being treated to, clearly, is an extended set of variations on that most ancient of all intellectual chestnuts, the infinite capacity of the professorial mind for the dogmatic and ludicrous misinterpretation of evidence regarding past civilizations. To make quite sure we get the point, Plato kicks off in his second oration (we are spared an in extenso version of the first one) with an elaborate interpretation of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection by Charles D ….. (the rest of the name is missing) as a “comic masterpiece” of fiction by Charles Dickens. Quite apart from the literary point, and wit, of this being about on the level of the far-right Mallard Fillmore comic strip (there is a passing reference to “the anecdotes of a comedian, Brother Marx”), it also exhibits some of that strip's attitudes. I found my mind running on Kansas and the Scopes trial, not least on being informed that “only in the Age of Witspell … was it realized that the petrified shapes found in rock or ice were created to mock or mimic their organic counterparts” and that “each portion of the earth produces its own creatures spontaneously.”

Ackroyd is so concerned with getting across his futurist (but in fact all too contemporary) view of Mouldwarp—that is, us—that he largely forgets to give his fourth-millennium society any kind of tangible reality. We have no idea how this London operates, what people do with their lives, even (except for casual references) what they look like. Any details that we glean belong either to a pseudo-classical past (Sparkler's long white robe) or to science-fiction (red-haired Sidonia has a “blue light shining from her”). And then there are the angels. We do not see them ourselves, but they are all around. They are interested in Plato's remarks about evolution. Their wing-tips change color to indicate emotion. A fun afternoon consists of taking a skiff down the Fleet and searching for angels' feathers. No explanation given. No explanation possible.

In the intervals of giving lectures, and exchanging bright chit-chat with his soul, Plato produces a really excruciating series of misdefinitions of Mouldwarp terms, which (let the reader be warned) runs on for pages. An antibiotic is a death ray. A dead end is glossed as “a place where corpses were taken.” Fiber optic is “a coarse material woven out of eyes.” A recreation ground becomes “an area of the city selected for the restoration of past life.” Rock music is “the sound of old stones.” Had enough? Good. Most of what Plato has to say is an elaboration of such conceits.

And if curiosity remains about the mysterious disasters coyly hinted at in the opening quotations, well, one cause of the Age of Mouldwarp's demise, apart from science, is presented as—get this—the worship of information: “The dimming of the stars and the burning of instruments had many complex causes, but there is every reason to believe that the sacred cult of information was at least one of the symptoms of decline.” What we have here is a text that is not only stupefyingly regressive, but also plain loony.

And the literary jokes bore on regardless. E. A. Poe is interpreted as an anonymous E[minent] A[merican] Poe[t], whose Tales and Histories offer “the unique record of a lost race,” the inhabitants of which “dwelled in very large and very old houses which, perhaps because of climatic conditions, were often covered with lichen or ivy.” There is a Platonic-style Academy, and to balance it a sub-Egyptian House of the Dead. In the year 3075, people do not just die and have done with it, they vaguely fade away like old soldiers. Plato (described as of Pie Corner, but by now it might as well be Pooh Corner) undertakes to speak on the first ages of the earth. In the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, Thanatos (Death) sheds ruby tears. We get Cerberus, but no Thracian women or homosexuality. The Apostles are linked to blood, guilt, and sorrow. Angels, we learn, seldom visited earth in those days, for lack of intelligent conversation.

The end of Mouldwarp is something again. The “cult of webs and nets” engenders despair. Stars and nebulae vanish because nobody is looking at them: the universe's components cease to be when not studied. Darkness spreads. “They had never understood that they were engaged in acts of magic, and that their universe was an emanation of the human mind. Then the sun went out.” Oops. The resentment and the anger that follows comes over as a sort of cosmic Luddism. Nets, webs, screens, signs, machines: all are destroyed in one vast conflagration, a raging holocaust. And then, a new morning: “Only then, in the exhaustion and silent despair which marked the demise of Mouldwarp, did the light of humankind begin its ministry.” This light emanates both from the earth and from individuals. There is no more night. It is the dawning of the age of Witspell. This is the old Armageddon scenario in a new pseudo-humanistic guise: the lux perpetua of the chiliastic Second Coming written up for the year 2000. Ackroyd may be a writer with a serious reputation, but here he is in the same business as Tim LaHaye.

As human light reappears, anxieties vanish. But note what happens to cheer folks up. A centaur is sighted in Greece. A phoenix duly rises from its own ashes in northern France. Banshees keen outside Dublin. Sirens sing off the Asia Minor coast. There is a resurgence of everything mythical from unicorns to valkyries, except that for Plato they are “the fabric of the old reality.” Atlantis, “otherwise known as Avalon or Cockaigne or the Isle of the Blessed,” surfaces from the ocean. I wish we were told just where. According to Plato, “it had always lain below the surface of Mouldwarp vision, but now it rose in glory.” Dante's Maleborge turns up in Sumatra, and Bunyan's Slough of Despond on the Welsh border. Ackroyd's eschatological future is nothing more than the rebirth of the pre-rational past.

At this point the academic parodist in Ackroyd takes over again, with Geoffrey of Monmouth's re-discovery as the oldest—and hence, of course, the best—surviving source on British history, and various features of London today given fanciful ritual explanations, presumably by fourth-millennium archaeologists. This stuff apparently affected Sparkler and Madrigal much as it did me: when Omatus informs them that Plato's starting yet another oration “at the clerk's well,” they both excuse themselves on the grounds of exhaustion. Lucky them, because what follows is a clumping send-up of Freud and his “straight man” Oedipus. Plato's excruciating account of their patter has to be heard to be disbelieved. (‘“Tell me, what is your opinion of chair legs and train tunnels?” “Rather out than in, as the bishop—”’ and so on.)

Are we done yet? We are not. We get Egyptian creation myth tangled up with string theory. We learn that in 3075 people only get to work when chosen (though we have no idea what they work at, or who chooses them), and they are proud of the honor. We also gather that rowing races take place, in which nobody is expected to win. Have a nice day. We get another elaborate anthropological joke in the form of a dragged-out misinterpretation of a strip from Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy, to read which is rather like being dragged slowly through a meat-grinder. And worse yet is in store, with hints and guesses applied to a charred fragment from the last section of The Waste Land (George [sic] Eliot as an African singer, “ieronymo” anagrammatized as “i.e. my room” = “that is my spell”). This is a book that shows its reader no mercy.

But Ackroyd is still not finished. In a patchy take-off from the real Plato's Myth of Er, he sends his own Plato on a symbolic time-traveling journey into the Cave of Mouldwarp. Since up above there was no sun, Plato finds shadows a novelty. (Blurry thinking there: what happens if you get in the blue light emanating from Sidonia?) Of course, the whole episode exists only to serve as an excuse for baffled incomprehension at everything that gets Ackroyd's goat about contemporary English society, from “the inhuman smell of numbers and machines” to cloning, the pursuit of profit, and an obsession with time. (There are no clocks in the fourth millennium.)

It is at this point that Ackroyd's Plato begins to admit that his orations have been “filled with errors and misapprehensions,” so much that the Guardians—ah, yes—put him, in default of Socrates, on trial for “corrupting the young by spinning lies and fables.” If readers expect Plato's trial to clear up any of the problems that we have encountered along the way, they are in for a big disappointment. The Guardians, clearly not so acclimatized to slippery metaphor as their author, accuse Plato of dreaming up the Cave of Mouldwarp in a drunken stupor. Plato himself muddies the waters further by wondering whether “we are being dreamed by the people of Mouldwarp,” adding provocatively: “And what if we were dreaming them?”

He follows this up with the dangerous platitude that ages which refuse to recognize any reality but their own are liable to go under. But despite this, he is acquitted. He wants to sentence himself but he cannot, since there is no longer a charge against him. Since his ego will not let him live on where reactions to him are limited to derision, disregard, or pity, he asks to be escorted beyond the city limits, into permanent exile. As Ackroyd portrays it, the world outside resembles the Bellman's chart in The Hunting of the Snark: a “perfect and absolute blank.” Exile on these terms is oblivion, and so regarded.

Plato's departure takes place in a barge, down the Fleet, with Sidonia in the prow. By now (once more according to Sparkler and Madrigal) not only are the citizens getting bewildered and restless as a result of Plato's protracted antics, but the angels, too, have left the scene. (They have, presumably, been bored wingless.) And here, at last, at last, Ackroyd's fable ends.

IV.

What on earth is all this about, or for? On the face of it, certainly, The Plato Papers seems too vapid a concoction to merit serious attention. It is set in a perfunctorily futuristic context, which is then made the platform for a sour all-out attack on contemporary Western mores. It harks back to the kind of pseudo-antique England celebrated by romantic Catholics such as David Jones or G. K. Chesterton, a reversion further overlaid with borrowings from Plato's Athens. This curdling mixture is then laced with simpliste and drawn-out literary or historical or philosophical jokes, most of them agonizingly flat. None of Ackroyd's characters, let alone the London that they inhabit, is even remotely real.

Why, then, waste time and space on such fustian stuff? There are several good reasons. For a start, the failings of this book cannot by any stretch of the imagination be ascribed to mere authorial inadequacy. Peter Ackroyd, the product of a working-class Catholic childhood, gained a double First in English at Cambridge, became Literary Editor of the Spectator at the tender age of twenty-four, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, won the Somerset Maugham Prize for his novel The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde and both the Whitbread Prize and the Heinemann Award for his biography of T. S. Eliot. Since 1986, he has been chief book reviewer for the London Times. He has published five biographies, and The Plato Papers is his tenth novel. This record means that anything that Ackroyd writes has to be taken seriously. He is not an amateur.

To read the paeans of praise with which The Plato Papers was greeted in the United Kingdom, one might suppose that Ackroyd had blessed the world with a tract combining all the virtues of Utopia, the Paradiso, and the Sermon on the Mount. Now, a worldly critic must discount a good deal of the hyperbole by reminding himself of the falsities of the London literary universe. But I suspect that the explanation for the enthusiasm is even more disquieting. It appears that it is Ackroyd's message to which some people are resonating.

British cultural journalists who pontificate in the review columns of the Times (Ackroyd's own pulpit), the literary weeklies, and the “Sunday heavies” (the Observer, the Sunday Times, and the Independent), have always had a weakness for anyone pushing what Stella Gibbons in Cold Comfort Farm mercilessly labelled Asterisked Great Thoughts, a.k.a. the Higher Nonsense; and there is (as I hope I have shown) a fair amount of the Higher Nonsense in The Plato Papers. Elsewhere, though mercifully not here, Ackroyd has shown an interest in kinky sex, and black magic, and serial killers such as Jack the Ripper, which certainly can widen an author's readership. But in this new fable of Ackroyd's, it is, I fear, the quasi-philosophical polemic that accounts for the hoopla. The Plato Papers turns out to be a minor classic (a pretentious and very minor classic) of whole-hogging reaction.

What Ackroyd's Plato attacks in this Mouldwarp of ours is nothing less than its rationally and scientifically constituted foundation. What he finds to praise in Witspell, and in the age that follows it, is its ditching of every axiom of rational thought, its regression to a kind of pre-industrial Luddism, its emphasis on instinct, intuition, and mythical vision, on life as self-generated metaphor. In Ackroyd, unreason is not a dystopia: quite the reverse. It comes across as a cuckoo utopia. In this vision of the eschaton, unreason bids fair to replace science as the definitive illumination of human life.

The creepy sacred wood that Ackroyd explores here has been home to a number of causes, by no means all of them harmless. They include, as we have seen, the sort of Merrie Englande Catholicism peddled by Belloc and Chesterton and David Jones. But this neck of the woods also nurtured the phallic fantasies and the blood-cults of D. H. Lawrence, not to mention the debased inheritors of Bergsonian vitalism. These last—blaming all the ills of modernity on the Enlightenment, on the French Revolution, on cities, and on technology, while seeking to locate genuine reality in myth and in the irrationalist imagination of the artist—opened the door to the worst ideological excesses of the century that has just passed; and they conform, with uncomfortable precision, to the overview served up by Ackroyd's Plato.

Is Ackroyd promoting this dark and nasty view of reality, or is he satirizing it? Therein lies his game. He hedges his bets with uncommon skill, but his own moral angle is about as hard to pin down as that of Thucydides or the real Plato. I suspect, though, that it shares with both these predecessors a taste for authoritarian blueprinting. The more rigid the creed, the greater its attraction; and for dictators, the greater its utility. Even the most innocent enemy of reason and science may end up in bed with some really terrifying monsters.

I do not mean to flatter Ackroyd by making him seem dangerous. His own position, I suspect, is fairly harmless, being for the most part literary, romantic, and nostalgic. Those angels are hard to explain on any other basis. They also suggest that he is expressing some late metastasis of his Catholic upbringing. When Sidonia talks about being joined by the angels “in a dream of my own,” claiming that “they whisper to me,” and sometimes finds expression in the voices of children—very Victorian, that—what springs to my mind is the end of Newman's famous hymn: “And with the morn those angel faces smile / which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.” Newman was also responsible for the observation that “it would be a gain to the country [Great Britain] were it vastly more superstitious.” That is the governing idea of The Plato Papers exactly.

How did an allegedly serious writer come up with so regressive and sugary a concoction as The Plato Papers? There is an interesting parallel here with the career of Jose Saramago, who followed up a series of splendid novels, most recently The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1996) and Blindness (1997), with a little fable even more pathetic than Ackroyd's, The Tale of the Unknown Island, which appeared last year. Do these writers—on the face of it so disparate, Saramago the professional Marxist and Ackroyd the not-so-cryptic Catholic—have anything in common? They do. Each was stamped long ago with a dogmatic and authoritarian creed guaranteed to leave its mark on their creative psychology for life.

Ackroyd's literary career offers a remarkable example of the inroads that programming can make on the free will, and never mind the subject's brilliance. At Cambridge, his interests lay almost exclusively in poetry. He came under the influence of teachers and students such as J. H. Prynne and Ian Patterson, who were moving towards the kind of experimental cosmopolitanism represented by John Ashbery and the New York School. After Cambridge he spent two years at Yale, where he wrote his Notes for a New Culture (1976). From this, and his published poetry, it became very clear that his literary compass would not work without the magnetic pole of authority.

Ackroyd the cultural acolyte found his master in Modernism. Poetry, he insisted, was about language, and had no further validity; and ever the good party-liner, he tried to write poems according to the formula. The results make for painful reading, and ended in mere incoherence: “The first axiom of this proposition is that the firpppppppppp the the the the the the the the the / spanish fly, my own true / tttttttttoooppp …” He brought in allusion, parody, pastiche, and five-finger variations on earlier texts (no wonder he later wrote biographies of Eliot and Pound), but it never seemed to work. “I can connect / nothing with nothing,” Eliot wrote in The Waste Land, and this seems to have been Ackroyd's problem, too.

As an escape from what Susan Onega has aptly termed “the modernist prison-house of language,” Ackroyd began to flirt with the no less constrictive (if more varied) doctrines of postmodernism, still conceding the artificiality of language while trying at the same time to find room for mythopoeia and transcendentalism. This took him into the business of novel-writing, and a complex self-contradictory system of trawling the past for realities that were also fictional. In Milton in America (1996), Ackroyd makes the carefully researched poet flee to the New World in 1660, just before the return of Charles II, and set up that most oxymoronic of institutions, a Puritan paradise, when by rights he should have been back in England writing Paradise Lost. Earlier, The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, (1983) its details researched with equal care, had Wilde himself, in brilliantly pastiched style, treating all accounts of him, his own included, as mere literary inventions, packed with inevitable distortions and misreadings. The theoretical constraints might be more surreal, but the obscurantism was still very much in place.

Pity the post-modernist. You don't need to work your way through, say, a book such as Linda Hutcheon's A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction to realize what a quagmire Ackroyd got himself into. Consult only the encyclopedias, and despair. From A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, we are referred to experimental techniques (some “perilously close to mere gimmickry”), “an eclectic approach, aleatory writing, parody and pastiche,” and, critically speaking, “complete relativism.” The Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism, bleating desperately about the apparent impossibility of something now existent coming after the present, offers six competing explanations of post-modernism and leaves us to choose. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and criticism regards post-modernism as the “site” of a number of recent intellectual debates, those applicable to Ackroyd including “the relation of an image-dominated consumer society to artistic practice.” The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism stresses “the fragmentation that defines existence,” and reminds us that with post-modernist writing “it is not always possible to tell if one is reading an autobiography, a history, a novel, or literary criticism.”

That last remark should resonate forcefully with readers of Ackroyd's writing in recent years, particularly (as we have seen) his fiction. But it also suggests what may have happened in The Plato Papers. Throughout his career Ackroyd has been looking for, wrestling with, trying to escape, and trying to reconcile with his talent, a whole series of ideological dogmata, principles, party lines, call them what you will. Wherever he turned, he found a certainty, a yardstick. It was in a final desperate effort to break free from this overpowering urge, to stop being an apparatchik to his own rigid and imprisoning psyche, that he took his plunge into the remote future, confident that whatever happened, he would have his praise-chorus to support him. And so indeed it has turned out. But what he didn't bet on was the discovery that, when he got there and could play things his own way, he would have no free-wheeling imagination left to dramatize his new world, and so could do nothing but let loose a ton of bile and nostalgia about what he had left behind. All the way to Witspell, to find only the old resentments and constrictions. Of all the bad jokes cluttering Ackroyd's book, this one is surely the worst.