Make the music mute

John Barrell

  • English Music by Peter Ackroyd
    Hamish Hamilton, 400 pp, £14.99, May 1992, ISBN 0 241 12501 4

Peter Ackroyd’s new novel is partly a narrative, partly a series of rhapsodies and meditations on the nature of English culture, written in the styles of various great authors. It is an important and a depressing book, its importance more or less in direct proportion to the depth of the gloom it sheds. With luck we may one day look back on it as the last ‘English’ novel.

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