BOOKS

The older the better

Francis King

THE HOUSE OF DOCTOR DEE by Peter Ackroyd Hamish Hamilton, £14.95, pp.277 Scientist, mathematician, geographer, astronomer, antiquarian, theologian, pos- sessor of the greatest English library of his time, John Dee was described by Frances A. Yates as 'one of the most influential fig- ures in the thought of Elizabethan Eng- land'. But parallel with this reputation as a scholar of outstanding achievement is one more sinister: that of a magus, in the man- ner of Pico della Mirandola or Henry Cor- nelius Agrippa.

For most of his life, when he was not travelling on the Continent at the invitation of this or that foreign potentate, John Dee, his wife and numerous children inhabited a rambling mansion by the Thames at Mort- lake. During one of Dee's absences abroad, a crowd, incensed by his reputation as a `conjurer' or master of the black arts, set fire to this mansion, destroying many of the rare and valuable books contained in it.

In Peter Ackroyd's complex and mysteri- ous new novel, it is significant that Doctor Dee's house should have been spirited from Mortlake to Clerkenwell. As in this author's Hawksmoor and Chatterton, it would be foolish and futile to look here for historical accuracy. Three pages before the end of his novel, Ackroyd asks: ... Is Doctor Dee now no more than a pro- jection of my own attitudes and obsessions, or is he an historical figure whom I have tried genuinely to recreate?

The answer must be that he is far more the first of these things than the second.

T.S. Eliot, of whom Ackroyd produced an outstanding biography, wrote in some by now over-familiar lines of how:

Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past.

This sense of past, present and future interpenetrating each other clearly obsess- es Ackroyd. Once explicitly, and frequently implicitly, his novel poses the questions: What is the past? Does it have a substantial reality or is it created in the formal act of writing? Am I discovering it or inventing it?

J.W. Dunne, similarly obsessed, often likened time to a river, on which we are carried as in boat, with our vision restricted to what is on either side of us on the banks and to what lies a short distance behind us and a short distance ahead of us. It is only in dreams or, for a few people, in moments of clairvoyance, that we ascend over the river, as it were in an aeroplane, and are at liberty to travel back and forth where we will.

Ackroyd usually prefers a different metaphor. This is either the archaeological one: of periods of history resembling the strata of some such great and ancient city as London, or the architectural one: of an old house; a patchwork of masonry from different periods. His characters are con- stantly aware of the tyranny of time and no less constantly strive to escape from it. 'I am still within the net of demons who gov- ern time,' Dee complains at one point; and elsewhere there is a reference to people being 'trapped in time'.

In this novel, two narrators alternate. From the past, there is Doctor Dee, deter- mined to hold converse with angels through his villainous 'shyer' Edward Kel- ley; to discover the fabled city of a London as old as Rome or Athens, a place of stu- pendous grandeur and richness, lying buried under the London familiar to him; and to create the immortal creature known to the alchemists of the time as the homunculus. From the present, there is Matthew, a young man with little memory of his own past, who, on inheriting from his hugely wealthy father what was once John Dee's house, begins to research into its often sinister and lurid history. Just as Dee dreams of a future in which he is 'turned into a book' by Ackroyd, so Matthew is haunted by this past from which he derives his being. Dee himself is an impressive but hardly admirable figure. He bullies his wife and his servants; he behaves with contemptuous sadism to a prostitute whom he picks up at the theatre and then takes to a brothel; and, when his father dies — the scenes between the two are among the finest in the book — he is content to let the old man be buried as a pauper, at no cost to himself. But though so steely, his character can buckle. In his relationship with Kelley, for whom he acts as amanuensis while the young man pretends to see visions in a ball of smoky quartz, he displays a pathetic gullibility; and at the death of his wife, poi- soned by Kelley, he gives way to the weak- nesses of an all too human grief.

Ackroyd's evocation of Dee's Eliza- bethan world is superb. Early in the novel, Dee boasts of an encyclopaedic knowledge of his London — of its shops, its ordinaries, its cockpits, its gaming-houses, its bowling- alleys. This is a knowledge which, miracu- lously, Ackroyd seems to share, so that when, at one point in the novel, Dee cele- brates his father's death by visiting in turn a barber's shop, a bear-pit, a play-house and a bawdy-house, every detail has a con- fident ring of authenticity.

Matthew is a far less vivid and far more enigmatic figure. Eventually revealed, not merely to the reader but to himself, as John Dee's homunculus, he also, in the last half-dozen or so pages of the book, merges in perplexing fashion with Ackroyd himself. His closest friend, Daniel, turns out to be not merely a transvestite but also the lover of Matthew's now dead father, with whom he has performed acts of sexual magic simi- lar to those performed by Dee. There is some failure of total realisation here, as there is some lack of total coherence. Despite the adroitness of the scenes between Matthew and the woman whom he has always thought to be his mother, his half of the narration is therefore far weaker than Dee's.

Many critics have praised the power of Ackroyd's imagination; fewer the brilliance of his style — or rather, since he is a mas- ter of impersonation, styles. In Dee's narra- tive, so vigorous, so rich in vocabulary, so teeming with similes and metaphors it might be Ben Jonson's Volpone who is talking. In Matthew's, so simple, so lucid, so poetic in its euphony, it might be some character from one of George Moore's later works. The contrast between the two narratives is fascinating.

Dee remarks of one of the books in his library, Ars Notaria: 'Note how every word signifies the quiddity of the substance, and how every sentence signifies its form.' The same might he said of this imperfect but always ingenious and arresting novel.