SOURCE: “Peter Ackroyd's Music,” in The New Yorker, November 23, 1992, pp. 142-44.

In the following review, Klinkenborg offers an unfavorable evaluation of English Music.

In Peter Ackroyd’s sixth novel, English Music, a great thickness of remembered time lies over the English landscape like a new fall of snow. “Yes,” the book begins, “I have returned to the past.” This voice belongs to Timothy Harcombe, narrating the events of his youth from a cavern deep in old age in 1992. Timothy is the son of Clement Harcombe, a fake medium who has prospered in London during the nineteen-twenties by using Timothy’s (very real) psychic gifts, which the boy himself is slow to discern. Onstage at the Chemical Theatre, with his father as mouthpiece, Timothy deciphers the worries and heals the wounds of the small audience that assembles there. At home, the two talk about what Clement Harcombe calls “English...