English Music

By Peter Ackroyd

Book Overview

A boy escapes from the harsh realities of post-World War I London into the evocative world of his imagination, where a discovery of his heritage offers him the key to understanding his own past.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0345376137
• ISBN13: 9780345376138
• Release Date: June 1994
• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 1.0" x 5.0"

Customer Reviews

Mish-mash of gifted prose looking back, and ahead???

Existential foray into father\son relationship, exploring the richness of the traditions in English art, music and literature in the process. The father, a former circus magician entertainer, uses the son's latent psychic abilities to get in touch with other people's pain in order to become a healer. The chapters alternate between fantasy and reality, and it is sometimes hard to evauluate which is which, as the main character, Timothy, romps around with a host of imaginary literary figures and real life misfits. Is Ackroyd making a sly commentary here about his predecessors or merely weaving the web of his current story? The effect is to relive some of your exposure to the classics, rechanneling Alice in Wonderland, Robinson Crueso, and Dickens (to name a few of the references) into a new scenario of discomfort. The enjoyment of this book, in the final estimate, is in entering into strange dreamlands of childhood hopes. Timothy hears the music, but he can't explai! n it. Does this failure ultimately signify that we are on the verge of composing a new song? In the end, Timothy settles for the simplicity of birdsong, leaving the discipline of continued searching for us, if we choose to make the journey onward. The spirituality in this novel is undeniable, but one can't put a finger on it. God with us, not God over and above or beyond us, may be the proposition.