[In the following review, Klinkenborg offers an unfavorable evaluation of English Music.]

In Peter Ackroyd’s sixth novel, English Music, a great thickness of remembered time lies over the English landscape like a new fall of snow. “Yes,” the book begins, “I have returned to the past.” This voice belongs to Timothy Harcombe, narrating the events of his youth from a cavern deep in old age in 1992. Timothy is the son of Clement Harcombe, a fake medium who has prospered in London during the nineteen-twenties by using Timothy’s (very real) psychic gifts, which the boy himself is slow to discern. Onstage at the Chemical Theatre, with his father as mouthpiece, Timothy deciphers the worries and heals the wounds of the small audience that assembles there. At home, the two talk about what Clement Harcombe calls “English music,” by which, Timothy says, “he meant not only music itself but also English history, English literature and English painting.”

It’s one of Timothy’s unworldly quirks that in every other chapter of English Music he has dreams or fits that land him in the midst of oddly jumbled settings, drawn from paintings he has seen or music he has heard or books that have been read to him at bedside by his father. (Timothy’s mother, who died in childbirth, was named Cecilia, we learn; the reader begins to smell an allegory.) In the first of Timothy’s dreams, he meets Lewis Carroll’s Alice and John Bunyan’s Christian. Later, he finds himself in a Gainsborough painting and on Crusoe’s island and in the seventeenth-century classroom of the composer William Byrd. It’s hard to tell whether these visions are meant to be some sort of curriculum or a sign of spiritual election. Then in the final dream, a pale echo of Malory’s “Morte d’Arthur,” Clement Harcombe appears as the Maimed King, and the last words Timothy hears in it are his father’s: “The old order changes, yielding place to the new, but I am eternal for I am Albion.”

Clement Harcombe is not only eternal and Albion; he’s also an inveterate gambler and a circus magician, one of a long line of circus magicians—though we don’t learn that until late in the book. In early days, when Timothy and his father are still a team, a circle of misfits—people who have been healed of one ailment or another—gathers around Clement Harcombe; they attend impromptu evening sessions at his home, during which he “would lecture them, provoke them teach them, prompt them lead them forward into a world which they hardly knew to exist.” A dwarf, a waiter, a man who pushes a tea van, a piano tuner, and a scornful beauty who later becomes Clement’s lover: these are young Timothy’s extended family. As his father becomes more elliptical, Timothy is sent to his maternal grandparents, for a conventional education. He grows up a little, he dreams, he grows up some more, he dreams, he takes after his father, and soon English Music has unwound all the way.

“What was the nature of inheritance?” Timothy wonders. That question, a good one, pervades English Music. To whom do the riches of any cultural tradition descend, and by what right, and how are they passed down? But the real issue in this novel, as in all matters of cultural transmission, isn’t inheritance. That may be the means, but authority is the end, and the two are inseparable. Timothy learns this not from his father but from William Hogarth, who pops up in another of Timothy’s dreams, midway through English Music. The painter leads the bewildered boy out of eighteenth-century Bedlam, where they have witnessed all the torments of hell, and they pass a mad fiddler sawing at his violin, wearing sheet music on his head. “English music,” Hogarth declares, “but played without any inheritance or authority.”

The anxiety of influence is one familiar model of inheritance—a model full of pompous poetic fathers and upstart poetic sons fighting over the literary estate. But Ackroyd’s model of inheritance is benign, pre-romantic—a mixture of English rationalism and genteel baptism, like being dunked in a river of warm ink while the tribes of Helicon watch from the shore. His poets aren’t loners, and they don’t wrestle for their legacy; it envelops them at birth, like the green, rolling landscape of southern England. “Our English genius,” Hogarth tells Timothy, “may flourish for a while and then decay … but its true spirit remains intact and ready to be gathered up by each succeeding generation even to the end of time—or of England.”

How it is gathered up is another question. At one point in English Music Ackroyd employs an eighteenth-century subgenre called the progress poem, which was used to trace the evolution of almost anything—agriculture or liberty or, in William Cowper’s case, the sofa. But the subject then was often the progress of poetry itself, tracing the line of true descent as it passed from generation to generation. The result was usually a narrow, fervid canon. In Chapter 16 of English Music the reader comes upon Ackroyd’s progress poem: a literary imitation of Blake with a poetic genealogy that runs from Caedmon and Chaucer to Ernest Dowson, via Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Dryden, and Thomas Chatterton (whose significance Ackroyd grievously overrates, as he did in the novel he named after that poet). What binds this literary succession together is the force of the English language. That, says Milton, who speaks in this chapter, “is the only substance, For everything exists there and not one note nor word nor work, Cadence or syllable, not one can pass away.”

Obviously, Ackroyd’s version of cultural dynamics is at once romantic and conservative, and perhaps not necessarily to be disparaged for being so. But what if you’re not just nostalgic about English literature? What if you still feel the real force of Shakespeare or Milton—or even Dowson? What if the stuff matters to you? Then I don’t think English Music can matter to you, too.

There’s something truly demoralizing about seeing Timothy running around with Pip and Estella and Miss Havisham, as he does in Chapter 4. Read “Great Expectations” (or Bunyan or Blake or Defoe) and you can sense the kind of inheritance that’s missing from the visionary chapters of English Music—a tradition rooted in expansiveness and depth, not mere learning. It sounds like a ridiculous question, but on whose authority do these characters from other works appear in Ackroyd’s novel, anyway? Never mind the clever epistemological confusion that comes when Obstinate, from “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” says to Timothy, “You may turn out to be a character, after all.” Timothy is a character—though only a provisional one from posterity’s point of view—and listening to him talk to Miss Havisham is like watching Paula Abdul dance with the Gene Kelly of “Anchors Aweigh” in her diet-Coke commercial: it’s a presumptuous equivalent.

But Ackroyd is partial to epistemological confusion, and his novels, including Hawksmoor (1986) and Chatterton (1987), tend to proceed in ways that suggest the permeability of ordinary time. The present, Ackroyd seems to feel, is the simultaneity of all the presents that belong to what we call the past. He’s especially interested in the psychic interpenetration of creator and creation—so much so that in reading his rather numbing biography of Dickens one often came to feel that there was no distinction in Dickens’s mind between the ghosts of his past, the characters he created, and the present-day reality of his own existence.

Though no one doubts the immortality of Magwitch and Pip, there is nothing illusory about maintaining that Dickens once existed in a different way from his characters. (Common sense isn’t necessarily a form of surrender.) But in English Music, as in Dickens, they are all there together somehow, on the same plane: creators, creations, editors, agents, readers, scholars, past, present, nouns, pronouns, all coexisting in a world whose “substance is language,” which “In its light and life … ever remains unaltered.” It is as if Ackroyd were trying to depict the power of religious faith by describing a Heaven no one would want to visit.

The borrowed characters in this novel—Alice, Christian, Miss Havisham, Albion—can be only as big as Timothy, after all, and that is not big enough. In English Music, Ackroyd’s imitations of Defoe and Blake and Dickens and Malory only remind the reader how wan these imitations really are. The story of English literature becomes a parlor game through which Timothy—the hero of what might have been a pretty fair conventional novel—sullenly wanders. In the end, Clement Harcombe’s death reminded me of another scene of literary inheritance, this one from Dryden’s great satire “Mac Flecknoe,” in which Flecknoe, a bad poet, leaves his powers to Shadwell, a poet who is even worse: “The mantle fell to the young prophet’s part, With double portion of his father’s art.” In Dryden’s poem, every word of praise is twinned with an irony that undercuts it, and his meaning is never in doubt. But when Clement Harcombe passes his circus act on to Timothy the reader is left wondering: Is it princely succession, Albion bequeathing his powers to a new king, or just an old magician handing down props to his son? The problem is that in English Music it really doesn’t matter: to name the poets is not necessarily to seize their fire.