Customer Reviews

Chatterton

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Peter Ackroyd's "Chatterton" was shortlisted for the Booker Prize award in 1987. It didn't win and remains a largely forgotten gem, being seldom if ever included in anybody's reading list today. The subject is an enquiry into the suspicious circumstances of the early and untimely death of 18th Century forger-poet, Thomas Chatterton by modern day poet Charles Wychwood and novelist Harriet Scrope. Cleverly structured around three separate plots and casts of characters, the reader is invited to wander into the past through a maze of speculative events spanning three centuries, which all come together neatly in the denouement. The novel raises several complex issues on art, truth and reality. Is reality fact for the unimaginative ? Does the poet not through his art create reality rather than merely describe it ? Does reality exist other than the representation or depiction of it ? Is imitation hedonistic and therefore worthless and untrue ? "Chatterton" poses these questions and more in a "whodunnit" style novel that is both witty and clever in its execution. Ackroyd's characters twitter rather than speak but not incongruously considering the context. Some readers might find "Chatterton" a bit of a curio today. The subject matter isn't exactly topical but the issues it raises are timeless and fascinating. A wonderfully entertaining and thought provoking book. Highly recommended.

Did Thomas Chatterton, one of the great forger/poets of the 18th century, die of an overdose of laudanum in 1770? Or did he fake his own death and continue merrily publishing work under the names of recently deceased poets?

When novelist George Meredith posed as Chatterton in Henry Wallace's painting "The Death of Chatterton," is it true that the painter made off with his oblivious model's wife?

In the present day, were the papers found by poetaster Charles Wychwood in Bristol really the confessions of Chatterton written in his own hand? And what about that painting of Chatterton as a middle-aged man? (He was supposedly 17 when he died.)

Will literary "resurrectionist" Harriet Scrope succeed in taking Wychwood's work on Chatterton and passing it off as her own, just as Stewart Merk merrily signed the dead painter Seymour's name to his own work?

Why am I asking so many questions?

Because there are no answers. That's all right, though, because the questions are great; and they just keep on coming. If you read this book, you will sink deep into a morass of counterfeiting, fraud, and outright fakery.

Be prepared to be bamboozled ... and entertained.

peter ackroyd has a wonderfully fun go at cultural fakery in a tightly written short novel about the literary forger chatterton. what's real? what do we want to be real? what's fake? what does it matter? chatterton reads as if our favorite brit novelists martin amos and a.s. byatt bumped heads in an elevator and came out writing like each other, but with delicious brevity

There is something Gothic about the novels of Peter Ackroyd. I sometimes feel as if I have stumbled into a dream. Maybe, this feeling arises from his conflation of history. In Ackroyd's Chatterton, all artists are fakes and plagiarists, untrustworthy souls that hold the thread of art together through the ages. But since art lives and is always in the present, the artists and their work exist together, which results in blurring images that induce vertigo in the reader. More precisely, the real lives (but are they real or just fiction) of Chatterton, George Meredith, and Wallis, overlap and co-exist with Charles Wychwood, the protagonist of the novel. This is vividly illustrated when Edward, Charles' son, thinks his father resides in Wallis' painting of Chatterton, which is really a painting of Meredith.

So you see the novel creates a puzzle: the "historical" stories operate within and without, in the past and in the present, and influence the "living characters," who are only characters in a work of fiction after all. Ackroyd notifies us early in the book that the sum of the parts operate like nesting dolls that illustrate Harold Bloom's thesis in his seminal work The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry-art springs from an imitation of the artists of the past and then progresses as a reaction or opposition to the influence.

This is not a new theme in the works of Ackroyd. It is an essential element in his outstanding biography of T. S. Eliot. In fact, there are Eliot tracks everywhere in the novel Chatterton. For instance, there is a scene in the Eliot biography where Eliot and his wife, Vivien, are walking in Wychwood. Wychwood then becomes the name of the protagonist-Charles Wychwood, a poet, who struggles with his small production of poetry. When he does produce a work it resembles Eliot's thin first volume, subsidized by Ezra Pound, another of Ackroyd's subjects.

So the question, at the end of the day, is whether all of these complications, allusions, and metaphors are worth the journey. If you love literature, bravura prose, and an excellent puzzle over a beer (or sherry), I would say yes.

"Chatterton" by Peter Ackroyd is a quirky, but interesting novel about an aged poet who discovers a lost journal that could turn the literary world upside down. It seems that Thomas Chatterton may have survived much longer than the world thought he did, and not only that, but he "ghostwrote" a lot more than we thought he did. Thrown into the mix is Harriet Scope, an elderly novelist, who is a secret plagarist(she rips off fourth-rate Victorian novels). Told from three different times: the 1770's through Chatterton's eyes; 1856 through George Meredith, who was the model in the famous painting of Chatterton; and in the present day, this novel explores just how far fakery can go, and the question if poetry really matters. There were a few flaws in it, but I did like how they explained what really happened to Chatterton, and why it happened.

I read this book all the way through. In that sense it is a success.
I enjoyed much of it but became exasperated with much of it as time went on.

Fiction writers today seem to think that overworking a theme is art. (Everyone you meet echoes everyone you just met; the same plotline is repeated over and over and over.) A little of this is charming. A lot of it is tedious. Same thing with the characters. Too many of them are over the top. It's life in Alice's rabbit hole. After awhile, I just didn't care.

So, although the book is clever and quaint and perhaps even artistic, I cannot recommend it.

Peter Ackroyd's Chatterton presents an enigma seen from several contrasting, some related standpoints. It seems to deal with the concept of authenticity and its consequences. In general we like things to be authentic. We like the people we meet and the possessions we own to be genuine. But what if they are not? Does it matter?

The historical basis upon which Peter Ackroyd hangs the plot of his novel is the life of Thomas Chatterton, the poet who committed suicide at the slight age of eighteen. Wallis's iconic painting of the death adorns the book's cover and its creation in the mid-nineteenth century forms a major element of the book's plot. There's also an eccentric English lady who has made money from writing and drinks gin incessantly from a teaspoon. There's an art gallery offering some works by a famous painter. They are declared fakes.

Charles Wychwood is an ailing, none too successful poet. He has a wonderful relationship with his young son, and a cooler one with his wife who has grown used to supporting her husband's apparent lack of achievement. One day Charles decides to raise a little capital in a sale-room, but then ends up blowing his money on a painting. It's a portrait, professedly of a middle-aged Chatterton. So perhaps he faked his own death so he could continue his trade anonymously. The idea captivates Charles because he knows a little of the poet's background.

Chatterton was born in the later part of the eighteenth century. He became obsessed with a series of medieval texts and started to copy their style. Thus he became the author of bogus medieval poetry, some of which he managed to publish. Unfortunately, he chose to publish not in his own name but in the name of a lost and forgotten medieval writer, thus passing off his own modern work as "genuine". Writers, like academics, tend to regard plagiarism as a capital offence. But in Chatterton's case, it wasn't plagiarism, was it? He wasn't trying to pass off another's work as his own. He was merely adopting a pen name which implied that the material came from a different era. One brings to mind the myriad of pop singers, pianists, opera stars, actors or even television personalities who have adapted new names and apparently different personas in their attempts to open doors. What price a genuine article? I recall hawkers parading through Kuta in Bali with their open wooden boxes of watches shouting, "Rolex, Cartier, genuine imitation."

But Chatterton's mimic status was uncovered. Scandal ensued and he earned no more. Penniless in a London garret he poisoned himself. Wallis painted the scene, albeit more than a generation later, it's apparent verisimilitude pure fake. We know the picture. The poet's red hair contrasts with his death pallor. An arm trails on the floor, the open window above suggesting a world beyond. But, of course, the man in the picture is a model, none other than the novelist, George Meredith. He made it into this picture of faked death only because the painter fancied his wife.

So if the painterly aspects of the canvas might be genuine, its context is mere reconstruction, perhaps invention. Does this devalue it? But what if Chatterton did not die at that young age? What if Charles Wychwood's painting of Chatterton in middle age is genuine? Did Chatterton fake more than poems? (Even if he did actually write them!)

Charles buys the painting and then visits Bristol to uncover some roots. He meets Joynson, an elderly man who speaks only in riddles. A box of the poet's memorabilia is secured. Is any of it real? Is any of it genuine?

And so the novel unfolds. What is authentic is often fake and what is genuine is often impersonated. But if a painting is worth looking at, does it matter too much if it is merely the content of a painter's imagination? Does it have to possess authenticity, even a pedigree to be an artwork? And so what if Chatterton did, or did not die? If he did, he died accused of being a fake, which he wasn't, because he did write his poetry. If he did not die, then perhaps he was a fake, because in that case we have no idea what else he did not write!

Like all Peter Ackroyd's writing, Chatterton makes the reader think. And by the way, Chatterton's characters are themselves creations of the author. They aren't genuine, are they?

I won't repeat the plot outlines others have given; I just want to say that Chatterton is entertaining, suspenseful and delightful. Peter Ackroyd skillfully weaves his three stories together, but more important, Ackroyd's characters are well-drawn and memorable. Ackroyd's writing is brilliant.

Thomas Chatterton was a real 18th-century poet. As a teenager he invented a 15th-century poet, Thomas Rowley and wrote poems in an appropriately archaic style. As a young man he went off to London, wrote poems and short stories, but could not sell enough of his work to make a living and committed suicide by eating arsenic. The poems of Rowley were collected and published after Chatterton's death, but it was not until the third edition that it was revealed the poems were entirely Chatterton's invention and his short and tragic life was embraced by the Romantics: Keats wrote a sonnet to Chatterton, Wordsworth used him in a poem, and he was the subject of Oscar Wilde's last lecture.

It is not surprising that Peter Ackroyd would be interesting in writing a novel about Chatterton's life, since the author has long been interested in masks, impersonation, and other ways of presenting a public pretense. Consequently, this is not a historical novel, although it deals with real people and real times. After all, little is really known about Chatterton beyond his poems. Obviously dissatisfied with the time and place of his birth, Chatterton creates Rowley as a way of improving his lot in life, or, at least, that is clearly his intention. But in the real world Chatterton cannot function. He takes pride in writing political satires that attack everyone and everything, but in failing to have convictions and a particular point of view, he reveals that in presenting other identities he has lost his true one. In this regard and in this novel, however, he is clearly not alone.

"Chatterton" is clearly not a conventional historical novel is that Ackroyd repeatedly plays with chronology. He is more interested in comparing and contrasting events than he is in sequencing them appropriately. There are four stories intertwined in this novel. Charles Wychwood is a contemporary figure, but also a failed and doomed poet, who is intrigued by a portrait which may or may not be of Chatterton. Since the painting is dated 1802, over three decades after Chatterton's suicide, it may or may not be real, but if it is, it raises the question of whether Chatterton really committed suicide in 1770. Could that have been but another instance of transformation and a means of adopting a new identity? In contrast there is Harriet Scrope, a popular novelist who has engaged in fakery and plagiarism her entire literary career and who is now trying to write her memoirs. She has a friend, Sarah Tilt, who is an art historian writing a book about death paintings and once again we have a painting whose authenticity raises interesting questions.

This leads us to George Meredith, a poet who was used by the painter Wallis as the model for his "Death of Chatterton" painting. In one of those true stories that reads like bad soap opera, the painter ran off with Mrs. Meredith, only to abandon her after she became pregnant. Consequently, Meredith becomes susceptible to the romantic tragedy of Chatterton's death as well. Chatterton himself is presented by means of an autobiographical document, which comes into the possession of Wychwood, drawing the little circle of characters even closer despite the disparate times and places of their existence.

Even without my detailing them you can get a sense for how these four stories are interwoven, the myriad possibilities of linkage drawing the reader further and further into Ackroyd's narrative web. The narrative structure, if we can even call it that, may well be too postmodern for some tastes, but there is a structure here and not some sort of episodic free association. I find it provocative and compelling. Of course every major character in the book wears masks within masks and the novel circles around its meaning rather than arriving at a profound and calculated conclusion. Ultimately, for me, Chatterton is not so much the main character as the dominant metaphor for Ackroyd's novel.

I had been looking forward to reading something by this author for some time. Maybe I would have been better off with another one of his books, or actually reading rather than listening. (This was a BBC audiobook, read by James Wilby). To begin with, I thought I had purchased a biography of Thomas Chatterton. I hadn't. This is a novel. A crew of annoying characters populates this speculative tale concerning poet Thomas Chatterton, who was of course the classic romantic what-if tale of English literature - a gifted young poet whose work went unrecognized in his time, a fact that helped push him to commit suicide at age 19 or so. In this book, an unsuccessful English writer discovers an old painting, which appears to be of Chatterton, but as a grown man. The story develops that perhaps Chatterton faked his own death, and from that point used a variety of noms de plume. The themes of doubling, faking, and questionable authorship persist throughout the story, and to be honest, I had trouble keeping up with all of it. An old female writer, the young writer's boss, also gets involved. There are attempts at adding levity by the portrayal of this loony crone (and other eccentrics) but these mostly fall flat. What I found most enjoyable was the historical fiction parts of it, the scenes of young Chatterton and his mates having discussions and plotting his phony demise - but the majority of the book takes place in the modern world, and the numerous inconsequential discussions and the like made me yearn for a blue pencil. Ackroyd is known mostly as a biographer (of Dickens and others). I still would like to give one of those biographies a try.