Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem brings together a series of grisly East End murders and the world of Victorian music hall, with a cast of real and imagined characters, from music hall performer Dan Leno to Karl Marx and George Gissing; and in Milton in America , Ackroyd creates an imaginary life for the poet, who travels to New England and founds a Puritan community "New Milton" , which he rules.
The Plato Papers is set 2, years in the future where the citizens of London look back on the Mouldwarp era, a dismal time in history which spanned to A. The Clerkenwell Tales , a story of adventure and suspense set in the late medieval world, was published in , followed by The Lambs of London , in , and The Fall of Troy Peter Ackroyd's published poetry consists of three collections, and he is also the author of works of literary criticism, as well as a book about the history of transvestism.
London: The Biography , is a history of the city that has exerted a powerful influence on his writing, and was awarded the South Bank Show Annual Award for Literature.
Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination , a cultural history of England from the Anglo-Saxon period to the present, was published in September He has also written books about Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock He is also writing a series of non-fiction children's books for Dorling Kindersley entitled Voyages through Time. In his biography of the eponymous director Alfred Hitchcock , was published. In his varied and prolific output, Ackroyd has attained both critical acclaim and popularity amongst the reading public: whether he is writing fiction or non-fiction he undertakes extensive, meticulous research, producing work that is extremely knowledgeable and scholarly, yet he combines this intellectualism with a lively imaginative flair, and an ability to present complex information and multi-faceted stories in an accessible, entertaining style.
In these and other works he writes in a postmodern style which blurs the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, often writing fictionalised stories about real-life historical figures, particularly London figures. In his multi-layered stories, Ackroyd also blurs and overlaps the past and the present, for he is a master of the dual narrative: many of these novels begin with a present-day discovery of a historical item or piece of information, and then go on to intertwine the present-day narrative with a story from the past.
As such, Ackroyd highlights the continuous interaction between past and present, and the way in which the two inform and influence each other, suggesting that historical 'fact' is merely a subjective narrative which is always open to interpretation. In Ackroyd's novel, the architect - though based on Hawksmoor - is named Nicholas Dyer, while, rather confusingly, the modern-day narrative comes in the form of a 20th-century detective named Nicholas Hawksmoor for everything overlaps in this novel who is investigating several murders which have taken place at the churches designed by the architect.
Hawksmoor is a brilliant and ingenious work, in which the two narratives sit comfortably together, overlapping smoothly and enhancing each other, as the grisly, macabre story is uncovered: in Ackroyd's dark and sinister version of events which he stresses is his own invention , Dyer is a secret Satanist who dedicates his church buildings to the devil by arranging human sacrifices, while the present-day murders investigated by Detective Hawksmoor seem to be connected to the churches' disturbing past.
The House of Doctor Dee , featuring Elizabethan alchemist John Dee, follows in a similar style, with another dual narrative in which the past is explored through a present-day character: this time, instead of a detective, the historical story is uncovered by a researcher, Matthew Palmer, who lives in the same house in Clerkenwell that was once inhabited by Dr Dee.
Again, the two narratives intertwine smoothly, creating a complex but coherent novel, while Ackroyd's acute attention to detail paints a vivid portrait of Dr Dee's fascinating life, along with London in both Elizabethan times and 20th-century society, and the relationship between past and present, people and place.
The city of London and its culture also feature strongly in Ackroyd's inventive and imaginative biographies, including T. He then devoted an entire book to the city in his acclaimed masterpiece, London: The Biography , a cultural and sociological history which is regarded as the definitive work on England's capital city it was followed by several companion volumes, including Thames: Sacred River and London Under Ackroyd has also written fictional or pseudo biographies and autobiographies of real historical figures, again demonstrating the lack of clear division between factual and imaginative writing.
Chatterton uses fictional autobiographical material to posit the suggestion that the 18th Century poet may not have committed suicide. It also explores plagiarism, forgery and imitation - Chatterton himself was a master of pastiche - and the novel is a complex and deeply thought-provoking contemplation of the subjectivity and ambiguity of literature, art and reality.
Two other works are written in a similar vein: The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde , a fictional confessional journal purportedly written during Wilde's last few months, and Milton in America , in which Ackroyd imagines what might have happened if the poet had left England after the restoration of the monarchy.
Ackroyd's output also includes several re-tellings and re-workings of classic works of literature - this is yet another way in which he interacts with history and his literary predecessors. More recently, The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein is an ingenious work written in the voice of Victor Frankenstein and featuring Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron and even Mary Shelley, author of the original novel, as characters. Victor and Bysshe Shelley meet at Oxford University, and their impassioned debates about science and religion form the intellectual and philosophical foundations of the novel, which traces Victor's thought processes as he goes on to construct his gruesome creation.
It is a tight, faintly anonymous space crowded with books and prints, and with a discouraging view on to the back of a building. Now in his late 60s, Ackroyd is famous for his Stakhanovite appetite for work: his books could fill a decent-sized bookcase, though such is their girth, you would probably need to reinforce it his gargantuan biography of Dickens weighed in at 1, pages.
As far as I can calculate, there are now 18 works of fiction and more than 30 biographies and histories. Ackroyd does nothing by half measures, as the legendary tales of his drinking testify. His abiding love is, of course, London — the city where he was born and has almost always lived, and which has infiltrated everything he has done.
London has always been a refuge. Perhaps it is both. More famously, a novel is written as a fictional diary by Oscar Wilde, a photograph of whom decorates his study, sandwiched between Thomas More and the Elizabethan magus John Dee. Yet the new work goes far deeper, travelling from the barely visible remains of Celtic London and the arrival of Christianity in the ADs to the great sex scandals of the 19th century — Wilde included — and on to recent fights for gay rights.
As ever, the book is rambunctiously inclusive, practically Rabelaisian. There are still drag bars, there are still travesti acts, there are still pick-up places in parks, there are still men-only clubs. As a percentage of the population, there were as many gay bars in 18th-century London as there are today.
He would sometimes be a male for males, sometimes a female for males, sometimes a female for females. For all the eye-opening frankness of his books, Ackroyd is known for his reluctance to bring himself into the frame.
Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination, a cultural history of England from the Anglo-Saxon period to the present, was published in September He is also writing a series of non-fiction children's books for Dorling Kindersley entitled Voyages through Time. Peter Ackroyd lives in London. He was awarded a CBE in Recent Past Lectures.
Upcoming Lectures. Nature's Numbers: Natural Capital Accounting. Holocaust History Under Siege. The Maths of Beauty and Symmetry. Free Thinking and the Rule of Law.
Food-and-Drink Borne Diseases. Women in Science Fiction. Attacks on Knowledge from Ashurbanipal to Trump.
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