Three Brothers
Peter Ackroyd, 2014
Knopf Doubleday
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385538619
Summary
Rapier-sharp, witty, intriguing, and mysterious: a new novel from Peter Ackroyd set in the London of the 1960s.
Three Brothers follows the fortunes of Harry, Daniel, and Sam Hanway, a trio of brothers born on a postwar council estate in Camden Town. Marked from the start by curious coincidence, each boy is forced to make his own way in the world—a world of dodgy deals and big business, of criminal gangs and crooked landlords, of newspaper magnates, backbiters, and petty thieves.
London is the backdrop and the connecting fabric of these three lives, reinforcing Ackroyd's grand theme that place and history create, surround and engulf us. From bustling, cut-throat Fleet Street to hallowed London publishing houses, from the wealth and corruption of Chelsea to the smoky shadows of Limehouse and Hackney, this is an exploration of the city, peering down its streets, riding on its underground, and drinking in its pubs and clubs.
Everything is possible—not only in the new freedom of the 1960s but also in London's timeless past. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—October 5, 1949
• Where—London, England, UK
• Education—B.A., Cambridge University
• Awards—Whitbread Award (2); Somerset Maughm Award
• Currently—lives in London, England
Peter Ackroyd is an English biographer, novelist, and critic with a particular interest in the history and culture of London. For his novels about English history and culture and his biographies of, among others, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot and Sir Thomas More, he won the Somerset Maugham Award and two Whitbread Awards.
He is noted for the volume of work he has produced, the range of styles therein, his skill at assuming different voices, and the depth of his research. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society for Literature in 1984 and created a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2003.
Early life and education
Ackroyd was born in London and raised on a council estate in East Acton by his single mother in a "strict" Roman Catholic household. He first knew that he was gay when he was seven. He was educated at St. Benedict's, Ealing, and at Clare College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with a double first in English literature. In 1972, he was a Mellon Fellow at Yale University.
Work
The result of his Yale fellowship was Notes for a New Culture, written when Ackroyd was only 22 and eventually published in 1976. The title, an echo of T. S. Eliot's Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), was an early indication of Ackroyd's penchant for exploring and re-examining the works of other London-based writers.
He worked at The Spectator magazine between 1973 and 1977 and became joint managing editor in 1978. He worked as chief book reviewer for The Times (of London) and was a regular broadcaster on radio. Since 1984 he has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
His literary career began with poetry, including such works as London Lickpenny (1973) and The Diversions of Purley (1987). In 1982 he published The Great Fire of London, his first novel, which is a reworking of Charles Dickens' novel Little Dorrit. The novel set the stage for the long sequence of novels Ackroyd has produced since, all of which deal in some way with the complex interaction of time and space and what Ackroyd calls "the spirit of place." However, his transition to novelist was unexpected. In a 1989 interview with Patrick McGrath, Ackroyd said
I enjoy it, I suppose, but I never thought I’d be a novelist. I never wanted to be a novelist. I can’t bear fiction. I hate it. It’s so untidy. When I was a young man I wanted to be a poet, then I wrote a critical book, and I don’t think I even read a novel till I was about 26 or 27.
Thematics
In his novels he often contrasts historical segments with segments set in the present-day (e.g. The Great Fire of London, Hawksmoor, The House of Doctor Dee). Many of Ackroyd's novels play in London and deal with the ever changing, but at the same time stubbornly consistent nature of the city. Often this theme is explored through the city's artists, especially its writers:
• Oscar Wilde in The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), a fake autobiography of Wilde;
• Nicholas Hawksmoor, Sir Christopher Wren, and Sir John Vanbrugh in Hawksmoor (1985);
• Thomas Chatterton and George Meredith in Chatterton (1987);
• John Dee in The House of Dr Dee (1993);
• Dan Leno, Karl Marx, George Gissing, and Thomas de Quincey in Dan Leno and the
Limehouse Golem (1994);
• John Milton in Milton in America (1996);
• Charles Lamb in The Lambs of London (2004).
Hawksmoor, winner of both the Whitbread Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize, was inspired by Iain Sinclair's poem "Lud Heat" (1975), which speculated on a mystical power from the positioning of the six churches Nicholas Hawksmoor built. The novel gives Hawksmoor a Satanical motive for the siting of his buildings, and creates a modern namesake, a policeman investigating a series of murders.
Chatterton (1987), a similarly layered novel explores plagiarism and forgery and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
London: The Biography, by Ackroyd, is an extensive and thorough discussion of London through the ages. In 1994 when interviewed by The Observer, about the London Psychogeographical Association, he remarked:
I truly believe that there are certain people to whom or through whom the territory, the place, the past speaks ... Just as it seems possible to me that a street or dwelling can materially affect the character and behaviour of the people who dwell in them, is it not also possible that within this city (London) and within its culture are patterns of sensibility or patterns of response which have persisted from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and perhaps even beyond?
In the three-book sequence, London: The Biography (2000), Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (2002), and Thames: Sacred River (2007), Ackroyd has produced works of what he considers historical sociology. These books trace themes in London and English culture from the ancient past to the present, drawing again on his favoured notion of almost spiritual lines of connection rooted in place and stretching across time.
His fascination with London literary and artistic figures is also displayed in the sequence of biographies he has produced:
• Ezra Pound (1980)
• T. S. Eliot (1984),
• Charles Dickens (1990)
• William Blake (1995)
• Thomas More (1998)
• Chaucer (2004)
• William Shakespeare (2005)
• J. M. W. Turner.
The city itself stands astride all these works, as it does in the fiction. Ackroyd was forced to think of new methods of biography writing in T. S. Eliot when he was told he couldn't quote extensively from Eliot's poetry and unpublished letters.
From 2003 to 2005, Ackroyd wrote a six-book non-fiction series (Voyages Through Time), intended for readers as young as eight, his first work for children. The critically acclaimed series ("Not just sound-bite snacks for short attention spans, but unfolding feasts that leave you with a sense of wonder", The Sunday Times) is an extensive narrative of key periods in world history.
In a 2012 interview with Matthew Stadlen of the BBC, when asked the question, "Who do you think is the person who has made the biggest impact upon the life of this country ever?" Ackroyd said, "I think William Blake is the most powerful and most significant philosopher or thinker in the course of English history"—though he did not say what had led him to form this opinion. In the same interview, when asked what fascinates him about London, he said he admired "its power, its majesty, its darkness, its shadows." When asked what he did outside of writing, he said, "I drink...that's about it."
Personal life
Ackroyd had a long-term relationship with Brian Kuhn, an American dancer he met while at Yale. After a nervous breakdown in the late 1980s, Ackroyd moved to Devon with Kuhn. However, Kuhn was then diagnosed with AIDS, dying in 1994, and Ackroyd moved back to London. He has long been known for his abuse of alcohol, and in 1999 he suffered a heart attack and was placed in a medically induced coma for a week. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/24/2014.)
Book Reviews
Three Brothers is an alternative autobiography, a ghost story and a murder mystery all in one slim volume. Dickens, Blake, and Eliot—all subjects of lives by Ackroyd—cast shadows over the three-ply narrative that is full of chance and coincidence, 'alliances and affinities,' 'contenders and young pretenders,' shape-shifters and shirt-lifters ... The waspish vignettes of literary London and fusty academe are a delight. The air is full of poison—and echoes of other Ackroyd novels. He sees the capital as 'a web so taut and tightly drawn' that the slightest movement sets off a chain of events ... The brilliant result is the quintessence of Ackroyd.
Telegraph (UK)
Three Brothers [is] a London novel which is permeated by Dickens ... The themes—lost childhoods and crime—are Dickensian, and the novel is suffused with the author’s awareness of the strangeness and often loneliness of the bleak streets of London. There is melodrama and comedy, and this too is Dickensian ... A book full of rich and sudden moments of delight.
Scotsman (UK)
London is a major character in the novel. In Ackroyd's accomplished hands the city becomes a mystical place, where visions abound. Highly recommended.
Daily Mail (UK)
Three Brothers, an amalgam of social satire and noirish thriller, is vintage Ackroyd."
Financial Times (UK)
[A] characteristically sly novel juxtaposing the mundane and the mystical in 1960s London. [A] trio of brothers...take radically different paths in life...[and] embody different aspects of Ackroyd’s own biography—a segmentation that contributes to their oddly impersonal feel. In contrast, the author’s beloved London [is] triumphantly alive...coincidence is everywhere, anything is possible.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) With overtones of Greek tragedy and Charles Dickens, this is a literary and engrossing parable and a loving tribute to London in all its depravity.
Library Journal
[An] intriguing if inconsistent latest...stew of family saga, murder mystery, political conspiracy and tableau of London's history.... Ackroyd's short novel maintains a patchy course.... At times humdrum and perfunctory, at others fantastical, this genre-spanning novel offers lightweight bookish entertainment.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)