English Music.

ENGLISH MUSIC

Peter Ackroyd Alfred A. Knopf, Jr., $23, 400 pp.

How in this postmodern age can any novelist compose a "sublime romantic allegory" and not wither in an ironic rejection? Peter Ackroyd offers a solution to this problem in English Music. His success depends upon an assessment of the sublime he invokes and of his fictional frame. The muse here is Blake whose words "Not one Moment of Time is lost" are the keys to redemption in this very religious work. The God worshiped is the Imagination and its Incarnation, as in Blake, is Albion, also named, English Music. This is really two books, a first-person narrative by one Timothy Harcombe, and a third-person account of Timothy's "dreams." The relationship between the two is ironic in the dramatic sense: Timothy appears to know less about the significance of his dreams than the reader--that is, a reader who is suitably equipped with a degree in English literature and a good reference library. And here is the thin edge of the postmodern wedge: the dramatic irony works to allow the reader a privileged position, an author's understanding of Tim's vision as the work of a medium, a channel. We watch and read as the character is written by the English Music, that is the Great Tradition of the English Imagination in its fullest sense--beyond T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis.

To what end? Tim offers his story and the dreams offer themselves as the timeless in time. The novel will have no end, just the circle turning in tune with the heavenly music of English muses, to the rhythms of English music and poetry and art and season and landscape and heritage.

The movement of the narrative line tells us that only Blake's absolute of Art offers consolation in the vale of tears which is life and which cycles and intersects as the "material" with the "real." Yet, ironically, the novel has this all as dream, more like the circus illusions which Tim, as his father before him, produces for gainful employment.

So clever a writer as Ackroyd has to beware of self-indulgence. He can reproduce the syntax, diction, and cadences of any author or period effortlessly and he clearly is having a great deal of fun. In the no-time of Tim's dreams the Pilgrim Christian walks through Alice's looking glass, William Byrd gives a composition lesson in good Jacobean prose, and William Blake's prophetic line recites in its distinctive prophetic form a genealogy of English writers. There are conundrums posed throughout: an alter-Sherlock Holmes tells Tim in a dream that his author is Tim's father:

"He sees us changed, too. At this precise moment he is seeing us as if we were in a vision." The detective was very grim. "He has been imagining my adventures. It is he who has been writing them down. Don't you understand now? He is the author of my being. And of yours also...he is bringing us to life even now. He is dreaming of us both."

The book is compulsive: every reference work on my shelves was open in allusion hunting. Sometimes the results of this sublime consolation are effective: the Byrd section has a central position and by theme and approximation to the title absorbs the author's great energy. But too often the process approaches the mechanical--Blake's Daughters of Memory and not of Inspiration preside. We have in fact the same problem which dogs whole sections of Blake's prophetic books--catalogues which fill out rather than compel. The finger test tells the true tale: pages get riffled to find out how many remain until the end of a section.

English Music does cause a form of recognition: How many of us have longed to live in the State of English Literature? Ackroyd has all the necessary requirements for citizenship or at least residence. And he is stunning in his ventriloquism even as he makes his Timothy a circus performer and a thrower of voices. The passages that do remind us of the consolations of the English Music are many. Yet as good a guide as Ackroyd might be in taking us into the Great Tradition, the originals have the better claim for our appreciation. Too often English Music is about doing things with words and not with what the words do. The effect is rather like reading the documentation for an elaborate piece of software called Divine Imagination.

This is not to say that Tim's narrative lacks interest. His struggles with his father, Clement, reverberate in a well-realized world, that of London in the twenties and thirties. Even though the cast of characters wear allegorical coats (e.g., dead mother = Cecilia = patron of music), they do act as real fictions. The "alert reader," so invoked by Mr. Ackroyd in his Acknowledgments, also knows that the allegory is at work everywhere. The divine magician can draw attention to the workings of his art too often and so fail to charm with his magic. I wish Ackroyd had succeeded better, had offered the cadences of English Music in a more enchanting form.