First Light.

First Light

OUR ENGLISH cousins correctly consider Peter Ackroyd one of their most gifted young writers. For sheer entertainment, for satire and pastiche, he is unrivaled in his generation. He has written a celebrated biography of T. S. Eliot and five luminous novels, the most recent of which is First Light. It contains many of the elements of good writing, including characters that are finely and deftly drawn and unusually short chapters that heighten the suspense of a story mixing London sophisticates, country rustics, modern technology, and ancient mythology. It is a virtuoso performance.

Any yet, a serious concern lingers. Will American readers, unfamiliar with Thomas Hardy (from whose style, settings, and even language Ackroyd freely and purposefully borrows) and not acquainted with the British penchant for the subtle disclosure of character, stay with Ackroyd long enough to discern his method and meaning? For make no mistake about it, First Light, though wonderfully engaging, is in many respects frustrating, or so it may seem to those used to swift plotting, constant action, and broadly, as opposed to specifically, crafted characterizations.

Ackroy is a master teaser. He teases in the sense that his writing gives constant clues of his intentions. These have less to do with development (let alone denouement) of plot than with the masterful disclosure of typical expressions of the modern personality in all its superficiality, comedy, hubris, and tragedy. But his pursuit of these objectives through satire and humor, pucturing poses in the manner of a P. J. O'Rourke, often obscures his achievement and very nearly spoils it.

First Light is the tale of a dozen or so individuals engaged in excavating a huge ancient tumulus in Dorset. The mound seems at first to be a massive, marvelously conceived reconfiguration of the heavens. A place of worship, perhaps? But the excavations soon reveal that the site is also a tomb, perhaps of the chief astronomer who inhabited the place around 4500 B.C. The process by which the entombed man's identity is determined--and the significance of that identity--is splendidly wrought, though whether the conclusion of the episode is as successfully handled is a question each reader must answer for himself.

But what is the meaning of it all? Readers who wish for a story that tells itself will be disappointed. However, those who prefer stories of a superior type, stories demanding the ful engagement of the moral imagination, will be rewarded, for First Light portrays contemporary men and women, their spirits diminished by self-absorption, in confrontation with an ancient sensibility of the sacred; of, in Ackroyd's oft-repeated phrase, "another time." Here is the human pilgrimage illuminated by the gifts of a superb stylist.

Mr. Bovenizer, of Regnery Gateway, is editor of the Cahill & Company and American Citizen reader's catalogues.