2013 read #105: First Light by Peter Ackroyd.

First Light by Peter Ackroyd
328 pages
Published 1989
Read from August 12 to August 15
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

There are reasons why I try to avoid contaminating my expectations by reading plot summaries on jacket flaps. For one thing, occasionally quite substantial spoilers get tossed off right there in the jacket blurb, most recently and egregiously observed with The Magician King. For another, sometimes the blurb is just plain wrong, most often describing a much more interesting story than what we actually get. First Light is a prime example of this second tendency. Here's the very first sentence of the jacket flap sales pitch: "Peter Ackroyd's brilliant new novel -- a major best seller in Britain -- begins with an ominous coincidence: the reappearance of the ancient night sky during the excavation of an astronomically aligned neolithic grave in Dorset." You can imagine how an image like that would intrigue someone like me. As soon as I read that I knew I had to get my hands on this book and hoard it until I had the chaance to settle in and savor it properly. And naturally none of that ancient night sky business is so much as hinted at anywhere in the book itsef.

Oh, sure, there's a pervasive and ongoing motif of light, stars, and time, of stardust and cyclical beginnings and endings, an artfully and expertly rendered motif that is one of this book's main charms. But I can't deny that part of me remains disappointed that I didn't get to read Peter Ackroyd's take on a full dechronization fantasy. Skilled literary authors going into genre can produce some amazing works, exploiting the possibilities of the impossible far more effectively than the hacks who normaly inhabit genre shelves, and I was certainly hoping for something like that here. Instead it's just one more among many tens of thousands of "middle class prfessionals being unhappy" novels out there, of the sort that put me to sleep if I'm not careful.

To Ackroyd's credit, he is indeed skilled at descriptiom and character depiction. His characters are exquisitely rendered and distinct in ways I can only envy. That doesn't mean I necessarily cared about any of them, though. There was a curious lack of emotional impact here, perhaps fomented by a host of 1980s storytelling cliches (schizophrenia, the uncertainty principle, the cult-like extended rural "family" protecting its secrets, easy pseudo-scientific philosophical frippery). I don't know enough about literature of the period to be able to judge whether stereotyped-but-sympathetic portrayals of homosexual characters were progressive in mainstream fiction at the time, or had already become common.