Peter Ackroyd (1949 – )

Ackroyd is a dandy, self-conscious, elegant and witty. His work is marked by an extreme artificiality. It is always at some remove from life, and he never leaves the reader in any doubt that he is reading a novel. Despite naturalistic passages, often extremely effective, his inspiration generally appears to be literature rather than life. This impression is reinforced by the knowledge that Ackroyd is also a fine literary critic and biographer, who has written illuminatingly of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. But he is also a poet, with a poet's awareness of mystery.

He has written five novels. The first, The Great Fire of London, derived from Little Dorrit, was a twentieth-century gloss on Dickens. Yet at the same time it was a highly individual and original work, a haunting novel of modern London – of all contemporary writers only Ackroyd reveals the poetry of modern London. It was followed by The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, which won the Somerset Maugham Award, and Hawksmoor (1985) which won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Withbread Novel Prize. Both showed his ability to get outside himself; Ackroyd's novels eschew the thinly disguised autobiography which less ambitious writers make the staple of their fiction. Both showed his talent for pastiche, a characteristic mode of post-modernist fiction. Hawksmoor offering a glittering reconstruction of late-seventeenth-century London in its exploration of the life of the architect who was a pupil of Wren and built St. Mary Woolnoth and St. George's, Bloomsbury. The novel is structurally ingenious, for a modern murder mystery is incorporated in the reconstruction, and the two plots, skilfully intertwined, play off each other. This novel, metaphysically convincing, masterly in its treatment of obsession, is Ackroyd's most assured success.

A similar technique, interweaving past and present, and employing pastiche, is used in Chatterton (1987). In one sense this novel raised the question whether Ackroyd's manner would stiffen into mannerism; yet it also, though marred by some grotesque and unconvincing caricature, revealed new aspects of his talent, in particular an ability to evoke tenderness, and a new depth of emotion evident in his treatment of the relationship between the unsuccessful poet Charley Wychwood (obsessed with the image of the dying Chatterton, the "marvellous boy" who, in the eighteenth century wrote poems in "old English" which deceived many into thinking them genuine) and his wife and small son. This ability to deal lucidly and unpretentiously with domestic emotions – and it is far more difficult to write well of a marriage than of a murder – suggested an intuitive sensitivity for which nothing in Ackroyd's earlier work had prepared one.

In his most recent novel, First Light (1989), echoes of other writers are still to be found, but pastiche has been abandoned. So has London. The setting is Dorset, and Ackroyd has written a novel in which a chief element is the sense of the past as an enduring present, a sense which throws into relief the merely provisional nature of modern urban society, and done this without falling into the portentous solemnity which has afflicted the serious English rural novel since Hardy. The novel's themes are time and the immensity of creation. Its action is concentrated on two sites: an observatory and an archaeological dig. He pictures the heavens spinning away, old forms of life trapped mysteriously under the earth – the buried treasure of race memory – and between them, men and women day to day playing out their little roles in the demanding urgency of brief time. It is the novel of a poet, a speculative book, but it is also comic, for Ackroyd's eye for human oddity is acute. These people in between, the men and women of today, are vividly, tenderly and humorously brought to life.

Ackroyd is a writer who fulfils Nabokov's requirement that the novelist should see the world as "material for fiction." He is also one who can legitimately be described as Dickensian: he has the same sense of the strange poetry of life, the same relish in human behaviour, the same awareness that comedy derives from the point of view, and he has learned from him how to give authenticity and vitality to a novel by placing naturalistic, even dull, characters at the centre and creating around them characters conceived and displayed as grotesques, who press in on the central characters and then pull away from them in a joyous celebration of human variety.