Introducing Swedenborg - Peter Ackroyd

 Talk about doing what it says on the tin...   Introducing Swedenborg is exactly and specifically what this short essay published by the Swedenborg Society does - and no more.   This is Swedenborg...  I'll leave you to get acquainted...  Must dash.

I've been increasingly curious about the Swedish polymath and mystic as I read more by Iain Sinclair and other psycho-geographers.   And that remains the case after reading Ackroyd's book.   I know a little more than I did, I will admit, but nothing significant.   I have learnt about his background in Sweden, how he started out as an engineer, became director of mines and a politician in the Swedish House of Peers.  I now know he spent a lot less time in London than I had thought and that Swedenborg House wasn't his actual house.   I have gained an overview of his mystical writing, which is the only part of his work that keeps his name alive, but nothing specific.   For example, who did he speak to when he was in the astral plane? 

This may be the point.   I will have to read Heaven and Hell.   I will have to look deeper into the work of writers I admire who also admire Swedenborg.   I was going to read more Sinclair anyway and I may even buy his Blake's London direct from the Swedenborg Society.

Occult London - Merlin Coverley

 A well-written and entertaining survey of some of London's premier occult landmarks.   I was however surprised by the sites left out - Cock Lane, for example, scene of the first sensational poltergeist infestation (though not the first incidence, which is about 100 yards down the road from me in South Leicestershire).   That said, Merlin Coverley's other work helps set his field of interest.   He is a psychogeographer in the footsteps of Iain Sinclair.   His sources are Peter Ackroyd, William Blake and Geoffrey of Monmouth.   He is interested in the mythic London lying behind and beneath the facade we see today.

Though Mortlake is a bit off-piste for Coverley, he covers Dr John Dee briefly and accurately.   Again, there is much more to be said about Dee but Coverley only claims to be an introduction.   In that sense, his guide to other, more comprehensive studies is invaluable.   I have been researching these subjects for more than fifty years and there were sources here that were completely new to me.

Like Covereley's companion volume Psychogeography, Occult London is a small, short book, but it is well worth a slow and careful read.   Lack of space has required Covereley to weigh every word, carefully consider what to include and what to refer the reader on to elsewhere.   Like his concept of London, the result is multi-layered and endlessly fascinating.

The Fall of Troy - Peter Ackroyd

This is a typical Ackroyd confection - a novel that looks and sounds like fictionalised history but actually isn't. You begin by wondering why what is obviously Heinrich Schliemann is called Obermann. Schliemann's young Greek bride was called Sophia, as is Obermann's, albeit the former was Engastromenos whilst the latter is Chrysanthis. Obermann's backstory is the same as Schliemann's - dubious mercantile activities in Russia; a Russian wife. And, obviously, Obermann has excavated the ruins of Hissarlik and is convinced beyond the slightest doubt that he has found the city as described by Homer.

Obermann is physically very different from Schliemann. The real discover of Troy was small and weasel-faced. Obermann is big and athletic, his physical presence as powerful as his belief in Homer's historical accuracy. Schliemann divorced his Russian wife, but one of the key twists of the novel is what Obermann did with his. The big difference, though, is that Schliemann was the discoverer of Troy whereas Obermann's story is specifically the Fall of Troy. The challenges to Obermann's preconceived mental map of Troy and the Trojans spurs him to extreme reactions. As the discrepancies increase they tip Obermann over the edge into primitive, primal behaviour - the sort of behaviour that the evidence suggests the real Trojans indulged in - and thus the book becomes the Fall of Obermann, brought down by Troy.

By changing the names Ackroyd gives himself licence to elaborate on the facts and shape them to suit his story. The challengers to Obermann - the American scholar William Brand and Alexander Thornton of the British Museum - are treated as physical threats, threats to his masculinity. Obermann meets them on terms, but in the end the force of reason wins out.
The Fall of Troy is therefore a book about scholarship, about the manipulation of history, about the idea of hero. What makes it special, the best of Ackroyd's recent novels, is that he uses his themes to enhance and illuminate his characters. Sophia, for example, is the most compelling of Ackroyd's female characters that I have come across. It is she, rather than Obermann, who has stayed in my mind. This is fiction of the highest quality.


I have always been interested in Troy. The Lost Treasures of Troy by Caroline Moorhead (1994) is my favourite non-fiction account of Schleimann's great project.
It is twenty years since I read it, so I won't review it here. Nevertheless I recommend it unreservedly. A quick internet search suggests it may now be called Lost and Found. Such are the perils of a title.

Three Brothers - Peter Ackroyd

Perhaps put off by his trivial 'brief life' of Wilkie Collins (reviewed elsewhere on this blog) I have been neglecting Ackroyd's fiction, as indeed has he. The last one I read was either Clerkenwell Tales  or The Lambs of London, both written more than ten years ago.  Since then Ackroyd has 're-written' The Canterbury Tales and Mort d'Arthur (don't need either, thanks) but only two original novels, The Fall of Troy (2006) and The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2008), which is a shame because he is an extremely good novelist with a fantastic take on literature and the world.  Hawkmoor, of course, is a classic, and I especially loved Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem.  Who wouldn't want to read the book behind a title like that?

I'm not going to pretend that Three Brothers (2013) is in that league but it is very readable, captivating, with a touch of a magic to it.

The premise itself is not up to much.  Three brothers, born exactly a year apart, and their early adulthood in London of the Sixties and Seventies.  For brothers so ostensibly linked, they live entirely apart in later life albeit they are linked by the mystery of their mother, who walked out on them when they were pre-teens.  Harry Hanway becomes a Fleet Street editor, Daniel a Cambridge lecturer, and Sam a lost soul, wandering through life.

It is Sam who happens upon his mother and her secret.  That secret in turn links the brothers - unknowingly, because they are not in contact - with other characters, the slum landlord Suppta, the monstrous newspaper proprietor Flaxman, the corrupt politician Askisson, and the pied piper charmer Sparkler.  It is London and its linkages that underpins the story - small worlds within the vastness of the megapolis.

And the magic... The brothers occasionally experience the emotions of their siblings.  Sam finds and then loses a nunnery, which disappears overnight, only to resurface at the very end.  The boys' insubstanstial, inconsequential but dutiful father, whose funeral brings them together for a day, looks back at them as his coffin disappears behind the curtain at the crematorium.  And Harry sees an apparition rise from the body of his sleeping wife.  These instances are left unexplained and therefore fascinate.  They are the making of the book, they justify the other, mundane and worldly coincidences.  They have reawakened my interest in Ackroyd.  I am re-enthused.

Venice, Pure City - Peter Ackroyd

I wish Ackroyd would get back to writing novels instead of these endless tie-ins for eye-candy TV series.  I was happy enough with his 'biographies' of London and the River Thames, but this - commissioned for Sky Arts - is 380 pages of puff.  He hasn't called it a biography because that infers life, and there is none of that here.  Nor is it a study, because it would have to be battened down with more fact than is apparent here.  I suppose it could be called a reverie, or a reflection upon themes Venetian - music, painting, empire-building etc. - but that would be generous.  It's beautifully written, of course, which only serves to remind us of the waste of talent involved in this gratuitous guff.

Wilkie Collins - Peter Ackroyd

This is a very short biography of Collins.  Collins himself was very short but extraordinarily productive, thus in 183 pages Ackroyd can only delve deeply into the best sellers - The Woman in White and The Moonstone.  He nevertheless manages to cover the others in a way that sparks my interest in reading them, which I assume was one of the aims.  Ackroyd can do this because he is such a fine writer.  He summarises the plots of these enormous potboilers in a paragraph or less yet always hits the salient point.  Mention of a blind girl who falls in love with a man who's turned himself blue certainly caught my attention.  I only wish the index was good enough to help me establish which book this was.

I've always been interested in Collins.  I bought Catherine Peter's The King of Inventors when it first came out in paperback in the early Nineties.  I no longer have it because it was a clunking great brick of a book, over-detailed and colossally dull, even though that was the first book I came across which discussed Collins' extraordinary love life (never married but maintained a longterm cohabitant and fathered a family with another woman whom he housed separately).  Ackroyd naturally includes this aspect of Collins' life but doesn't provide enough detail about the women involved.

The fact is, this is a poorly published book (to look at it, you'd never guess it came out in 2012) in which Ackroyd canters charmingly through other people's research.  It's an introduction, at best an overview, a taster to encourage the interested to look elsewhere.