SOURCE: “The Relics of Learning,” in The Spectator, May 30, 1992, pp. 24-5.

In the following unfavorable review of English Music, Buchan objects to Ackroyd's sentimental literary pastiche and the postmodern notion that originality is no longer possible.

This novel starts well. A boy stands in the glare of gaslight on the wooden stage of an East End theatre, helping his father perform acts of faith healing. It is 1925 or thereabouts and the London air is crowded with the souls of the recent dead. Though he barely yet knows it, it is Timothy Harcombe, not the father he adores, who has the medium’s power of communication with the departed spirits.

Timothy’s mother is also dead, and he is soon separated from his father and put in the care of his grandparents in Wiltshire, which is an Ackroydian Siberia, Timothy goes to school while Clement Harcombe moves in with...