English Music:
Wheeler, Edward T.
being. And of yours also ... he is...
...Leavis...
...The finger test tells mantic allegory" and not ware of self-indulgence...
...I wish Ackroyd had sucenly music of English muses, to the ceeded better, had offered the cadences rhythms of English music and poetry and of English Music in a more enchanting art and season and landscape and heritage...
...The Blake, is Albion, also named, English posed throughout: an alter-Sherlock passages that do remind us of the consoMusic...
...are the keys to redemption in this very Blake's prophetic line recites in its dis- And he is stunning in his ventriloquism religious work...
...he is bringing us to life even now...
...This is really two books, a first- Holmes tells Tim in a dream that his au- lations of the English Music are many...
...Peter Ackroyd offers a solution author or period effortlessly and he clear- tion...
...He can reproduce the true tale: pages get riffled to find out wither in an ironic re- the syntax, diction, and cadences of any how many remain until the end of a secjection...
...Don't you un- ing the documentation for an elaborate ably equipped with a degree in English derstand now...
...The divine the dreams offer themselves as the time- magician can draw attention to the workless in time...
...It is he who has been the words do...
...and thirties...
...The book is compulsive: every reference work on my shelves was open in allusion hunting...
...The novel will have no end, ings of his art too often and so fail to charm just the circle turning in tune with the heav- with his magic...
...At this pre- taking us into the Great Tradition, the origTimothy's "dreams...
...Yet, iron- mechanical Blake's Daughters of ically, the novel has this all as dream, more Memory and not of Inspiration preside...
...He has been imagining doing things with words and not with what about the significance of his dreams than my adventures...
...Ackroyd in his AcT.S...
...Even though the cast of charWe watch and read as the character is writ- acters wear allegorical coats (e.g., dead ten by the English Music, that is the mother = Cecilia = patron of music), they Great Tradition of the English A t do act as real fictions...
...Yet person narrative by one Timothy Har- thor is Tim's father: as good a guide as Ackroyd might be in combe, and a third-person account of "He sees us changed, too...
...There are conundrums performer and a thrower of voices...
...His struggles with his fato allow the reader a privileged position, ther, Clement, reverberate in a well-realan author's understanding of Tim's vi- ized world, that of London in the twenties sion as the work of a medium, a channel...
...Sometimes the results of this sublime consolation are effective: ENGLISH MUSIC The movement of the narrative line tells the Byrd section has a central position Peter Ackroyd us that only Blake's absolute of Art of- and by theme and approximation to the Alfred A. Knopf, Jr., $23, 400 pp...
...Too often English Music is about ic sense: Timothy appears to know less very grim...
...frame...
...The effect is rather like readthe reader that is, a reader who is suit- writing them down...
...He is the author of my piece of software called Divine Imaginliterature and a good reference library...
...to this problem in English Music...
...ation...
...His suc- ly is having a great deal of fun...
...fers consolation in the vale of tears which title absorbs the author's great energy...
...like the circus illusions which Tim, as his We have in fact the same problem which How in this postmodern father before him, produces for gainful em- dogs whole sections of Blake's prophetage can any novelist ployment...
...Eliot and F.R...
...Tim offers his story and legory is at work everywhere...
...The "alert reader," Imagination in its fullest sense-beyond so invoked by Mr...
...knowledgments, also knows that the alTo what end...
...The muse here is Blake whose William Byrd gives a composition lesson Ackroyd has all the necessary requirewords "Not one Moment of Time is lost" in good Jacobean prose, and William ments for citizenship or at least residence...
...He is dreamOFF-KEY ing of us both...
...The detective was ciation...
...The God worshiped is the tinctive prophetic form a genealogy of even as he makes his Timothy a circus Imagination and its Incarnation, as in English writers...
...And here is the thin edge of the post- This is not to say that Tim's narrative modern wedge: the dramatic irony works lacks interest...
...is life and which cycles and intersects as But too often the process approaches the Edward T. Wheeler the "material" with the "real...
...El Commonweal 26 March 1993: 25...
...In the no- English Music does cause a form of cess depends upon an assessment of the time of Tim's dreams the Pilgrim Christian recognition: How many of us have longed sublime he invokes and of his fictional walks through Alice's looking glass, to live in the State of English Literature...
...The relationship cise moment he is seeing us as if we inals have the better claim for our apprebetween the two is ironic in the dramat- were in a vision...
...ic books-catalogues which fill out compose a "sublime ro- So clever a writer as Ackroyd has to be- rather than compel...
...form...
Vol. 120 • March 1993 • No. 6
