LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

II/12. PETER ACKROYD (1949)

● A Desperado author is not happy until his reader gives in to the novel as to a trance. Ackroyd moves back and forth in time, between centuries, or between minds, confusing the reader, who ends by living in a perpetual present, which includes all times, all thoughts, all sensibilities. The highly narrative style is mingled with a lyrical suspension of disbelief. Although full of suspense and palpitating stories, his novels are preeminently lyrical experiences.

● Ackroyd creates his own reader, the sharing reader, who has to do much more than take the author’s words for granted. He has to lend himself to the author’s expert hand, and this author is never satisfied till he reaches absolute communion. He leads us, readers, to the point where we become him, the author. We partake of a sacred rite (the novelist’s imagination). The novel is like holy communion with an overwhelmingly creative mind. Ackroyd is a stream of imagination, and the reader becomes creative himself, in a natural, soft way, quite new to the Desperado stiffness.

● Ackroyd, who wrote a remarkable critical biography of T.S. Eliot, works with leitmotifs, just like Eliot. His images are repeated at intervals of centuries, and we feel above time, which is again quite un-Desperado. Exultation at the power of imagination is uncommon to the Desperado reticence, the Desperado commonsensical view of the supernatural. Even dystopias are practical, realistic, as true to life as possible. When Ishiguro places The Unconsoled in the dream world, he makes sure it is a nightmare, no joy involved, although his nightmare turns in the end into a captivating reading experience. Unlike other Desperadoes, Ackroyd is willingly an exile from reality.

● Ackroyd travels in the bookish, cultured space of the reading mind. His plots float in written texts, spring from other plots, stumble into other authors’ characters. Ackroyd thrives on literature. He writes Eliot’s biography, and also makes St. Mary Woolnoth (the church in The Waste Land) part of his Hawksmoor. He masses together authors, composers, painters, in English Music and Chatterton. Minds meet beyond ages, above time, and literature becomes a space of communion.

● Death is a recurrent theme, which burdens all Desperado sensibilities, from Graham Swift (Last Orders) to Barnes (Flaubert’s Parrot), Lessing (The Memoirs of a Survivor), Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient). Ackroyd treats it like a sweet mystery. It is present in all his novels as a physical state, not as an incident. There is a life in death, a life after death, life and death are woven together. Ackroyd uses his imagination and lyricism to make us see death as the courage to live beyond. Crossing the border, crossing all borders, is Ackroyd’s lesson, the reason why his books are strong and invigorating.

● The aesthetic value of the ugly, the scary, the depressing and the unhealthy is an influence of Eliot again, but Ackroyd does something old Eliot would never have expected. He restores beauty to those states, whose hideousness appealed to Eliot precisely because it was something else than harmony. A character believes in Satan and builds churches to evil, another has brief moments of relapse into the frightening literary common subconscious. Fear is hope, feelings storm. Ackroyd’s literature emanates spiritual strength.

● Ackroyd is a great lover of narratives, and he finds new narrative modes in an easy, natural way. Hawksmoor ends one chapter and begins the next with the same sentence, in a new context, and the mysterious connection between alternating times becomes obvious. English Music plunges the main hero into trance chapters, going as far back as several centuries. Ackroyd uses parallelisms as often as they can be invoked. He has a critic’s mind, which sees hints to be decoded in every corner, and the soul of a novelist, which fills those hints with magnetic lyricism. We are drawn to the past, we are drawn to literature as if it were real life, our life. We share the story with the narrator. With Ackroyd we never feel excluded, challenged, an outsider. He urges us to witness creation from the inside. We appropriate the text.

● Ackroyd uses bits of poetry in all his novels. Usually poetry opens for him the door into the out-of-time, into imagination, which is all powerful. Most Desperadoes are not that lucky. They are dry and refuse access to the beyond. Ackroyd has an uncommon gift of phrase, which shows he is a poet, not just a novelist. He loves words, and he is good at making them cohere harmoniously, in sentences which are, in fact, short poems in themselves. He is not so much direct as evocative of moods. He reaches the reader via the reader’s ability to be impressed emotionally and aesthetically. Peter Ackroyd manages to combine the love of striking, memorable words of his stream of consciousness predecessors with the matter-of-fact narrative of the Desperadoes. He is a hybrid of two authors: one who means to enslave the reader, the other one, who sets the reader free to find his own way, and watches him enigmatically. More a slave to words than his contemporaries, Ackroyd takes us into his confidence, using all the devices he can think of, confident the reader will always approve. His approving reader is, indeed, right by his side.

● Chronology is ruined in a subtle way. All time feels like the past, and we feel privileged to share it. Ackroyd is not a matter-of-fact narrator, like Lessing, Lodge, Bradbury. The others have their own colours, too. Lessing is bitter, Lodge and Bradbury humorous, Barnes bitingly witty. Ackroyd takes refuge in tenderness. His sensibility ruins the line of the story, diving into oceans of is and was, reminding us they are all a primordial sea, wherefrom we all come and into which we shall one day return. History swallows chronology, and whatever the moment, we only know we are still alive, ready to live more, willing to read more.

● Unlike most Desperadoes, Ackroyd is preeminently quotable, like Graham Swift. This comes from the care with which each word is loaded with lyricism. Incidents become symbols, while carrying the story on; they support both story and its interpretation. Reason is not enough for a reader. He must reach beyond understanding, the book pushes him outside himself. Ackroyd is a striver for the limit of understanding, and his readers must actually accept more than can be logically explained, which brings lyricism back into the picture once again.

● Not trying to be witty, humorous, or even ironical, the only refuge left for Ackroyd is to be in dead earnest. He builds his plots in good faith, meaning what he says, and never implying disparaging parallels, never talking about characters tongue in his cheek. Ackroyd’s narrative good faith makes the reader devour the incidents without wondering how real they can be, as long as their burden of poetic mystery motivates him to look for emotion, more than meaning.

● Typical for a Desperado, Ackroyd mixes fiction, poetry, drama, history, music, thoughts and dialogue, and keeps the reader interested although he provides no romance, no love interest. The interest of the Desperado novel obviously moves from the couple to the lonely individual facing life. The author does not feel at liberty to inform us about this character’s life in the traditional, chronological way, the past caused by the present, and the present triggering, causing the future to happen. The character rejects chronological causality, as a matter of fact. Life is a mystery to him precisely because it loses the line of time. The novel ends in a huge question mark, a communion, in Ackroyd’s case, with the unspeakable.

● Writing about very humane heroes, Ackroyd is in the habit of debunking history. The Royal Architect Nicholas Dyer melts with a Scotland Yard detective. Chatterton the literary forgerer who created a whole trend is a confused youth who desperately wanted to live, although literary history thinks him to have committed suicide. His death melts with Charles’ very real and depressing, common death. As it happens, Chatterton is a book of fakes. A poet fakes his death, a painting fakes Chatterton’s image by using Meredith as a model, a painter fakes his master, a novelist fakes a good novel by copying the plot of another novelist, in conclusion nothing is reliable any more.

● Ackroyd creates the dreamy novel, perfectly illustrated by English Music. The plot of this book is our mind itself. It is written both in the first and third person. Real life and dreams or trance alternate. The moments of trance sink deep into old music, old literature, old painting. The further back our mind takes us into the past, the stronger the plot. The plot is our own thought, we identify completely with the text. We share the ever after and ever before. The book is private, and reading it is a private experience, too.

● A Desperado work, whether poem or novel, has many layers of imagination, reminding the critic of South-American fiction, such authors as Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Ishiguro did very much the same as Marquez in The Unconsoled. Eliot came also very close in The Waste Land. Cultured fiction, cultured poetry, are very common with Desperadoes, while it was an innovation with Eliot. The Notes to The Waste Land were like a manifesto, while Desperado works are cultured as a matter of fact, like breathing in and breathing out. Among waves of literary memories, the unwilling narrative winds among mysteries af all kinds, which we are required to absorb as they come, thus humouring the novelist. Besieged by thoughts of other writers, Ackroyd hands us the very substance of his haunted mind.

● Ackroyd is both a novelist and a scholar. Many Desperadoes need previous work of documentation before embarking on a novel. They use their critical ability to assume a Victorian air (Fowles), the air of Greece (Fowles again), the atmosphere of communism (Orwell), French literature (Barnes). Ackroyd chooses T.S. Eliot for a critical biography, which becomes a novel in his hands. At the same time, it is illuminating for Eliot himself. Ackroyd creates Eliot as a character. He reveals Eliot’s soul, on the basis of the circumstances of his life, which are the bare plot. As he says in an inteview, ‘The mind is the soul,’ which means idea and feeling are one, plot and emotion melt in the intensity of the experience of reading.