The Clerkenwell Tales, The Lambs of London, and The Fall of Troy by Peter Ackroyd

I had high hopes for Peter Ackroyd, hopes that were bitterly disappointed. Before I'd even read a page of his work, I knew him from London: The Biography, which won critical acclaim for its comprehensive and vibrant survey of 2,000 years of London's history. So when I brought home these three slim volumes from the library: The Clerkenwell Tales, The Lambs of London, and The Fall of Troy, I was ready for a long afternoon of bliss. But alas, no.

Ackroyd errs most with The Clerkenwell Tales, and his biggest error is aligning himself with Chaucer, setting his novel in the last year of the poet's life and assuring his readers that many of his characters "are also to be found in the Canterbury Tales." This does nothing to help Ackroyd's story and rather hinders it. Though the 23 chapters are broken into tales (The Prioress' Tale, The Reeve's Tale, etc.), the actual stories often bear no resemblance to those in Chaucer's poem, and they lack both the poetry of the original and the sense of being on a journey. Ackroyd sets himself against an epic poet and achieves an epic fail.

The Lambs of London is no better. Once again, rather than standing on his own two feet in the world of fiction, Ackroyd relies too heavily on his predecessors. In this novel about a Shakespeare hoax, Mary Lamb refers to London as a "great jakes" in just the fifth line. Gack! Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, we don't need Peter Ackroyd to write Shakespeare (badly).

Fortunately, the last volume of Ackroyd's work I read allowed me to leave him on a high(er) note. The Fall of Troy tells the story of Heinrich Obermann, an archeologist who seeks to unearth Homer's world, through the voice of Sophia, his much younger, Greek-born wife. Again, Ackroyd is speaking to his ancestors; this time, to Melville as he fashions the Ahab-like, monomaniacal Obermann. It's a nice novel, nothing spectacular, but at least it saved me from having wasted an entire afternoon.