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All fades into obscurity.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n It has been many years since I first read this novel, and upon rereading it recently what struck me the most was not the book\u2019s supernatural element, but the coldness of the contemporary protagonist \u2013 Matthew Palmer \u2013 for whom I was unable to conjure up the least smidgen of sympathy. In fact, there is a chilliness that pervades the whole of the book that left me, for all of its merits, to a degree cold. \u2018Behold the world without love,\u2019 enjoins the shade of Dee\u2019s late wife at a critical juncture of the story, and the same may be said to the reader of the tale as a whole, but this feeling of emotional sterility was doubtless intentional on Ackroyd\u2019s part, for he is too good a writer for it not to have been. The protagonist, his mother, and father are each deeply estranged from each other, with their set of alienated relationships being echoed in the dysfunctional relationships between Dee, his wife, and his dying father, but beyond this it is the physical fabric of the house \u2013 or what remains of Dee\u2019s dwelling \u2013 that unites them all.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In terms of its structure, this tale, like a number of others penned by Ackroyd, involves the interweaving and interpenetration of two distinct periods, in this instance the Tudor London of Elizabethan magus Dr Dee, and the capital that you may have known some quarter of a century or so ago. Neither London, of course, is with us today, for it has in many respects been rendered as unrecognisable as its sixteenth-century incarnation. It is, however, in his conveying of the ambience of the latter that Ackroyd excels, along with his measured updating of Elizabethan speech for a modern readership; in this respect, he is a conjuror of spirits, and raises Dr Dee, or a version thereof, from his slumber of centuries. His ghost is made to speak.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Alas, however, as a story it has its flaws. Whereas I rather enjoyed that part of it that was set during the sixteenth century, I did not care for the chapters set some four hundred years later, which it would have been better to have dispensed with. As for the book\u2019s concluding chapter, it was a confused and muddled mess that seemed jumbled up with the author\u2019s reflections on the writing of history and fiction. This second reading will therefore, I think, be my last. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n H.E. Bulstrode\u2019s latest novel \u2013 Upon Barden Moor \u2013 an occult mystery centring upon a single summer\u2019s day in Edwardian England, is now available on Kindle<\/a> and in paperback<\/a>. \u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n To sign up to H.E. Bulstrode’s newsletter, please click here<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\nShare this:<\/h3>