Milton in America

By Peter Ackroyd

Book Overview

When Peter Ackroyd, one of Britain's undisputed literary masters, writes a new novel, it is a literary event. With his last novel,The Trial of Elizabeth Cree, "as gripping and ingenious a murder... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0749386258
• ISBN13: 9780749386252
• Release Date: January 1997
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.44 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The Best Milton is Ackroyd's

I'll leave it to other reviewers to summarize the plot of this excellent novel, instead calling your attention to the significant episode when Milton disappears from his Puritan village for 6 weeks, regains his lost sight, and is welcomed as an equal when adopted by an native tribe--whose mysterious animism he, in turn, adopts. We see a great 17th-century intellect overwhelmed by a 21st-century spirituality, and we contemplate the structure of faith, intellect, history and truth. Structure is a theme, too, as again Ackroyd's modus operandi is a strand of narratives and narrators whose knot of stories are worth the reader's untying. Of course, Ackroyd's protagonist is a Milton, not the Milton; and this Milton is a doer, not a writer. As another English revolutionary, GBS's John Tanner, said, "He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches." So the novel never mentions "Paradise Lost" because Ackroyd's Milton has come to America to regain the paradise--to `do' paradise--rather than stagnate in Restoration London to teach about a paradise in an epic poem. To take off from Stanley Fish's title on "Paradise Lost," we are surprised by Milton's virtue when he becomes our post-Christian co-religionist. By far, this is Ackroyd's best book from the 14 novels, biographies and critical studies of his that I've read. And the best Milton I've read in a many a year.

Intriguing, compelling, brilliant writing and construction.

This is a wonderful book: Ackroyd at his intriguing and often ambivalent best. It is interesting from an English point of view because, after exciting and unpredictable opening chapters which deal with Milton's (fictional) flight from England to the "New World", it finally resolves into a conflict between a narrow-minded Puritan community led by a hideously bigotted Milton and a Catholic community nearby. Milton's bitter single-mindedness and ruthless determination to wipe out the "Roman Whoremaster" (Ralph Kempis) and his Catholic community is masterfully drawn by Ackroyd. The contrast he draws between a tolerant, easy-going Catholic settlement and the fanatically bigotted Puritans leave one in little doubt as to where Ackroyd's sympathies lay.From an English point of view, particularly, it is fascinating to recall that at the period in which the book is set England had just replaced a Protestant (Puritan) Commonwealth with a Protestant Monarchy ! (Charles 2nd). Obviously, any Protestant community, even one which not many years previously had lopped off the king's head, would be preferable to the hated Catholics. Thus the New England militia were called out to support the 'bigotted' Puritans rather than the 'enlightened' Catholics. What if they'd backed the Catholics?Altogether an excellent, intriguing, funny, moving and ultimately poignant book. Wonderfully written. Read it.