Volume 42, Number 14 · September 21, 1995
Little Guignol
By James Wood
The Trial of Elizabeth Cree: A Novel of the Limehouse Murders
by Peter Ackroyd
Doubleday/Nan A. Talese, 261 pp., $22.00
History, for Peter Ackroyd, is a puzzle for which the novel is a solution. The puzzle, broadly speaking, is coincidence; the solution, that there is no such thing as coincidence. For 'Everything is part of everything…Everything is part of the pattern,' as a character in his novel First Light puts it. His novels tend to follow the outline of a sensational historical mystery or secret—that Sir Christopher Wren's chief architect was a devil-worshiper and murderer who embedded corpses in the foundations of his new churches; or that Thomas Chatterton, the doomed eighteenth-century poet, did not die at seventeen, but faked his death and lived into middle age. The historical mystery is central to a present-day situation which mimics it. In Hawksmoor, a detective investigates a series of murders, all at seventeenth-century London churches built by the architect and friend of Wren, Nicholas Hawksmoor. In Chatterton, a struggling contemporary poet is haunted by Chatterton's ghost when he buys a portrait of the writer in an antiques shop. In Ackroyd's recent novel, English Music, a boy sets out to explore the mysteries of English literature by going back in time to meet Dickens and Defoe. These books are filled with shifting historical atmospheres, strange parallels, and long-standing curses.
Review, 2721 words
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