First Light [Audio Cassette]

Peter Ackroyd (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 15, 1997

Written by the author of "Hawksmoor", winner of the Whitbread Prize for Fiction, and "Chatterton", this is a pastoral novel of the late 20th century in which the author meditates on the nature of history, the problem of time and the true qualities of the English landscape.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

First Light is not the darkest of Peter Ackroyd's novels (Hawksmoor has that honor), but fans of the macabre will relish its exhilarating combination of cosmic awe, ancient beings, and creepy underground tunnels, in a humorous suspense story as cleverly paced as a Hitchcock thriller. The story is that the excavation of a neolithic, astronomically aligned grave under the pastoral hills of Dorset, England, coincides with the startling reappearance of ancient stars (including H. P. Lovecraft's Aldebaran) in the night sky. A group of deliciously eccentric characters--archaeologists, astronomers, a stuffy civil servant, a stand-up comic, and vaguely menacing local villagers--converge at the site and collide with each other. As Gabriele Annan wrote in the London Sunday Telegraph, "Ackroyd is such a master of mood, of tension, angst, foreboding, frisson, but also of tenderness and exultation, that one is drawn into his tale as by a magus." --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

T. S. Eliot biographer and novelist Ackroyd ( Chatterton ) again delivers a fascinatingly ambiguous tale. The discovery of a neolithic grave site on the Devon-Dorset border attracts an assortment of archeologists, astronomers and indigenous characters. Each has his own agenda, from archeologist Mark Clare, hoping to prove a maverick theory, to Joey Hanover, a show-biz character who happens along in search of his roots. Astronomer Damien Fall may have discovered something astonishing, and the exceedingly peculiar Farmer Mint and his idiot savant son, Boy Mint, may hold more cards in this game than anyone knows. The novel is carefully imbued with several ominous portents that lead nowhere, but the tone is so deliciously creepy that it doesn't matter. Ackroyd's sly humor is beguiling; he has given some of the best lines to a lesbian couple and Joey's malaprop wife. (" 'Look at those kikes,' Florey Hanover was saying to her husband. 'Dressed like Winston Churchill.' 'Dykes, dear.' ") Silliness and illumination fit together perfectly in this amusing, eccentric and provocative novel.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Audio Cassette
• Publisher: Books on Tape, Inc. (October 15, 1997)
• ISBN-10: 0736640320
• ISBN-13: 978-0736640329
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.6 x 2.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,864,256 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A literary treasure and a darn good tale, December 28, 2003

By 

Avid Reader (Franklin, Tn) - See all my reviews

This review is from: First Light (Paperback)

I was not sure what to expect when I picked up this book. The story begins in the present but it is the past that guides and carries us along. Whimsical, darkly humored, mysterious and rambling - an excellent literary work.

The book connects the star Aldebaran with the tomb of an ancient Neolithic race whose ancestors continue to guard the tomb to this day. The Mints, the family that has served as watchers for this hole in the ground, still maintain a close watch. It is too much to give away the plot but needless to say it is all tied up in the end and involves primitive ritual, a casket and a long buried secret. Beautiful writing that is as mesmerizing as it is flawless.

14 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Glorious Celebration of Bathos, Pathos and Wit, February 8, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: First Light (Paperback)

In this, his latest novel Peter Ackroyd returns to a by now fascinating theme of original forms and repeating patterns in which the individual holds but a brief tenure before relinquishment to the next generation in human kinship. This novel develops a much-loved theme of awe and inspiration in the workings of a tale of ancient beings, cosmic forces, love and madness. To reiterate, repeated patterns over time form a familiar concept to Ackroyd admirers, and can be found in his earlier works, such as Hawksmoor. Where First Light differs from the latter is in the move away from an ancient, pervasive if imperfect evil, depicted in the most sinister way through human sacrifice, as embodied by the fate of Little St Hugh. First Light offers a juxtaposition to the vacuum of evil in Hawksmoor and sacrifice in this latest novel is portrayed in various forms as part of a general, metaphysical good. In comparing Ackroyd's novels, it is worth mentioning the music hall motif, which stands as a literal backdrop to chilling murder in (UK edition) Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, known to USA readers as the less successfully entitled The Trial of Elizabeth Cree etc. Here the music hall is brilliantly reintroduced into this novel as a glorious celebration of poignant and hilarious bathos, with the reminder that its absurd and often grotesque characterisation is more often eclipsed by the antics and eccentricities of the so-called 'ordinary person'. Peter Ackroyd's reputation as an exceptional author whose ability to weave a powerful and haunting tale hardly requires further testimony. Ackroyd however, always demands a good deal of work by the reader and is not in the business of providing glib answers and conclusions. There is always far more to his novels than can be found by a desire for the easy gratification of titillated curiosity and consequently any criticism of his ability as 'whodunit' manque, completely miss the mark

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars First Light: Man's Cosmic Quest., January 30, 2010

By 

Loopy Book Club Editior "The Loopy Book Club" (Eugene, OR) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: First Light (Paperback)

First Light by Peter Ackroyd. Grove Press. Copyright, 1989. 328 pages.

...Once there were creatures of light leaping across the firmament, and the pattern of their movement filled the heavens. But the creatures soon fled and in their place appeared great spheres of crystals which turned within each other, their song vibrating through all the strings of the world....Aldebaran...the great star.... One hundred and twenty times brighter than the sun....In this same area of the sky...small cones of light, called the Hyades and believed to be at a greater distance from the earth--cool red stars glowing within the clouds of gas which swirled about them. And close to them the lights known as the Pleiades, involved in a blue nebulosity which seemed to stick against each star, the strands and filaments of its blue light smeared across the endless darkness. Behind these clusters they could see the vast Crab Nebula, so far from the earth that from this distance it was no more than a mist or a cloud.... Galaxies. Nebulae. Wandering planets. Rotating discs. Glowing interstellar debris. Spirals. Strands of brightness that contained millions of suns. Darkness like thick brush-strokes across a painted surface. Pale moons. Pulses of light. All these coming from the past, ghost images wreathed in mist.... I am on a storm-tossed boat out at sea, the dark waves around me. This was what the earliest men saw in the skies above them.... A hundred thousand million galaxies. A hundred thousand million stars in each one.
The above quote came from Page 1 of this amazing book. It's probably the best first chapter I've ever read. The reader is immediately sucked into this awestruck world that acknowledges the vastness of the cosmos, its by-product of cosmic energy, and the enveloping cosmic consciousness that is inherent in every aspect of creation under heaven and earth.
It's a story about prehistoric men and their quest to understand the cosmology of the night sky and to question why they are here on planet earth. It's a tale about ancient mankind forging customs and folklore from their understanding about the meaning & origins of life and sharing their knowledge with future generations.
The early mythology begins 3500 years ago, when ancient man looked up at the firmament of heavens and dared wondered the meaning of their existence. Man saw stars as fire torches burning brightly the memory of all that came before them between the dark spaces of the universe where somewhere beyond the sight and knowledge of mankind, lay portals to our origins where we return to at the time of death.
Page 328 describes it this way: ... Our bodies are made out of dead stars. We carry their light inside us. So everything goes back. Everything is part of a pattern. We carry our origin within us, and we can never rest until we have returned.
Mark Clare is an archeologist that stumbles across an underground tumulus in Dorset, England at Pilgrin Valley. He's received official permission to begin an excavation of the ancient site dating from the Megalithic Period, 3,000 years ago. Almost immediately his crew unearths a stone plinth covered in celestial markings that tell of the great star Aldeberan and which leads to an underground maze.
Unsure of the meaning of the pictograph, he befriends an Astronomer, Damian Fall nearby at the Holbrook Observatory. Fall has been studying for decades the constellation of Pleiades and in particular the red dying star of Aldeberan.
As the story unfolds all sorts of unsettling incidents occur including escapades with eccentric, local characters; experiencing surreal events like strange places, time warps, or cottages with white masks nailed to a ceiling, underground caves, ancient spells and ancestral burial places, and other unnerving coincidences which of course, impact the lives of the main characters. The languid & simplistic tone of the story effectively enhances the eeriness of the situation and the unusualness of the tale.
In one incident, Damian struggles to understand his role as a cosmic being which is excellently described in detail on pages 155-156. Here's part of it:
Darkness. And I, too, am an aspect of that order, a relic of earliest creation which space & time have now woven together: nothing can happen to me without subtly altering the shape of the visible universe. I too am moving away through limitless space; I am part of that infinite expansion which seems to me to be an infinite horror. Yet I am not my self; I am as evanescent and as shifting as every other part of the cosmos, a fortuitous arrangement of particles, a small plateau in the endless decomposition of space and time, a stasis in the struggle of forces which has turned into matter.
Darkness. And yet I am not matter; I am merely the space through which the forces of the universe pass, just as the billions of neutrinos pass through me in their journey across the cosmos. I am of the same order of being as a gas cloud, or a constellation. Everything is watching everything else and now.... He wanted to flee. But where could he escape to? He could not flee to the sky. He knew that there was no sky. He knew that it was only light which had been trapped....

All in all, it's an outstanding, enjoyable read that opens us to the cosmic realities of our very nature. This is where mankind's new understanding of the cosmos merges with the ancient concepts of spirituality. A modern religion of Quantum Physics meets Hinduism and indeed, it's a fine attempt at understanding these two gargantuan concepts in a well written, sublime story.