Chatterton by Peter Ackroyd
234 pages
Published 1987
Read from June 14 to June 16
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Themes of forgery, reproduction, plagiarism, emulation, influence, and inspiration are the through-lines of this novel. It's easy to see why the real life story of Thomas Chatterton -- poetical wunderkind and forger whose medieval pastiche helped inspire the Romantic movement, the "marvellous boy" who apparently suicided at 17 -- would appeal to the sensibilities of Peter Ackroyd. This makes two consecutive books that left me glad I read his Albion, this time because digesting that volume tipped me off to Ackroyd's preoccupation with artistic lineage, the recurring genetic elements of English wordcraft, how history and inheritance are the pulse and pulp of artistic creation in any age. The image of a later poet, posing for a portrait, becomes the face of Chatterton, and the death of another character duplicates the truth in that fiction. "I said they were fakes," one character says. "But that doesn't mean they aren't real."
The clearest emblem of this idea comes in the form of Chatterton's central MacGuffin, a painting which appears to depict a middle-aged Thomas Chatterton, but which (major spoilers!) turns out to be a later forgery applied upon several different other layers of portraits on the same canvas. Chatterton's poetic heirs paint their own images over the faces of those who came before, but the painting dissolves entirely before the original image is seen.
This thematic feast is, however, the main attraction of Chatterton. Ackroyd populates his novels with eccentrics, vividly -- even grotesquely -- depicted, here becoming a mass of clutter like the interior of a junk shop whose proprietor feels a pang at the thought of letting anything go. Charming at first, the concretion of peculiarities and madmen and barbed witticisms eventually grows wearying. Two or three moments of genuine emotion emerge unexpectedly from all this surface detail, but ultimately the impression is more arabesque than Romantic.
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