English Music = English Art + Literary Pretentiousness
Written: Aug 19 '05 (Updated Aug 20 '05)
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Pros: Passages of elegant prose revealing wide reading of English literature.
Cons: A lot of digression which serves little purpose but to show off the author's learning.
The Bottom Line: Patches are worth reading, and it is cleverly written.
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| johngo's Full Review: English Music Books |
Peter Ackroyd has an enormous reputation as one of the most eminent English men of letters, a biographer of Dickens, and author of the novels Hawksmoor and Chatterton. He is a metropolitan writer and the provincial reader, sensitive to the lack of shared reference, is made all too aware of the feeling of the Londoner writing for Londoners, and to Hell with the rest of the bumpkins, the group of which I am a member. In this novel, as in some of the novels of Dickens, London, the city, is a looming presence, with seeming moods and motives, almost a living character; and in English music the East End, an apparently unbounded network of shabby, decaying, brick-built streets, provides the background for the story of the relationship between the boy Timothy and his father, Clement Harcombe, among the dejected lower middle class, in the period from the end of the First World War until the beginning of the Second.
Cecilia Harcombe, Clement's wife, died bearing Timothy. Clement and Timothy live together, without other companions, in seedy rooms. Harcombe is a spiritualist medium who has attracted a collection of followers; he and his son are supported by the voluntary offerings left by the part congregation, part audience that attends his meetings held in a dilapidated meeting hall, the so-called Chemical Theatre. Timothy, though a child, takes part in the portion of the performance devoted to healing those members of the audience who request the treatment by the laying on of Harcombe's hands. The sadness and shabbiness of the followers, the seediness of the surroundings, the general hopelessness is illuminated from time to time when one of the followers does seem to benefit physically from Harcombe's ministrations.
For unrevealed reasons Harcombe educates Timothy at home in the daytime. Timothy is a sensitive boy who falls readily into lucid dreams, the dreams shaped by the eccentric curriculum imposed by his father. The novel describes Timothy's growing up among the failing and hopeless clients of his father, in the East Eng, interspersed with visits to the country, to Wiltshire to stay with his mother's parents, where, eventually, he is taken in, and is sent to school. The structure of the novel is unconventional as the chapters fall into two separate types: one type a fairly realistic and affecting description of Timothy's life; the other comprising rhapsodic pastiches that purport to represent Timothy's dreams. For example, in one chapter Timothy falls into a world blending Alice with The pilgrim's progress,in another he finds himself in the world of Great expectations,, in another still he is taught music by William Byrd, and in yet another, in the alleys of London, he is taught about art by William Hogarth. All of this is very clever: the simulation of the style of Lewis Carroll and of Charles Dickens is very accomplished, and it cannot be denied that the prose is beautifully shaped and cadenced, but I found the display of middle-brow erudition incongruent with the quality of the writing, and a distraction from the curious doings of Clement Harcombe and their effects on the growing-up of his son.
One by one the chapters alternate, a realistic one preceding a rhapsodic mystical one, and so on. The theme of the mystical chapters is the English Music of the title of the novel. In fact, as used within the novel the phrase English Music refers to all the characteristic attributes of English art. My heart sinks when an attempt is made to circumscribe art by geography. English literature is all very well: the English have had Shakespeare, some great novelists, a marmoreal epic poet, and some great lyric poets; but the besetting literary weakness of the English is their parochial unwillingness to learn other languages, and their consequent isolation from the literature of Europe; so most English connoisseurs are unable to place the valued English literature into the context of the rest of European literature, never mind the context of Islamic literature, or Chinese literature.
English landscape painting is much admired by English connoisseurs, but you don't find many other places in Europe with Flatford Mill, or The blue boy reproduced on table mats. It is true that there is English music, the musical kind, rather like English wine, refined, but not exactly full-bodied and intoxicating: there's not much of it, and it doesn't seem to travel very well. I was tempted simply to skip the dream chapters. Perhaps I was too imperceptive to detect the subtleties of the linkage of rhapsody to reality, but mostly the rhapsodies struck me as the sort of padding that might impress those who take seriously the kind of art criticism that appears on the television or in the colour supplements of the Sunday newspapers. (Could this be intellectual snobbery?) In the acknowledgements Ackroyd writes patronisingly 'The scholarly reader will soon realize that I have appropriated passages from Thomas Browne, Thomas Malory....and many other English writers; the alert reader will understand why I have done so.' I think that the author was attempting to imply that art, and in this novel, English art in particular, has a platonic purity of existence untainted by the sordid mechanics of feeding and f***ing, birth and death that maintains the continuous population of composers, performers, and audience necessary for its creation, transmission, and reception; and so the music is clean and beautiful however debauched and diseased the people involved with it. Yes, well, as Samuel Goldwyn said 'Pictures are for entertainment, messages should be delivered by Western Union', and the same goes, if you substitute novels for pictures.
Despite my dislike for the hallucinatory chapters, the story of Timothy's developing relationship with his father was interesting and emotionally involving, though, on reflection, this interest might have been exaggerated by my relief at the relative realism after having slogged my way through another chunk of name-dropping pretentiousness, or literary-competition pastiche along the lines of Write A summary of The pilgrim's progressin the style of Lewis Carroll.
In conclusion, though I admired the prose, I didn't admire or enjoy the book very much.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
johngo
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Member: John Ollason
Location: Scotland
Reviews written: 83
Trusted by: 62 members
About Me:
I used to work at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, a lecturer in ecology.
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