The House of Doctor Dee

It's a regular trick among postmodernist authors to interrupt their own work by inserting themselves into the prose as a narrator or a character. You find this in John Fowles, Martin Amis, B.J. Johnson, and now Peter Ackroyd. Some authors (the less skillful ones) do this just for fun - their presence in their own work adds nothing to the story, the theme or the aesthetics of what they're doing. More skillful authors pull this stunt for some specific reason. The most skillful do it with both purpose and fun in mind. I have no idea yet whether Ackroyd avails himself of this tactic in his other work, but I'm happy to report that it happens in "The House of Doctor Dee" for both reasons. As the title implies, the action of this work revolves around a house in the Clerkenwell section of London that comes into the possession of one Matthew Palmer, an independent researcher, through his father's will. He shortly learns that the house belonged to John Dee during the reign of Elizabeth I back in the mid-1500s. John Dee was an actual person, a philosopher, mathematician, astrologer and student of ancient lore. He himself narrates about half the chapters in this novel, and Matthew Palmer narrates the other half. That is, their identities remain that separate and distinct until the influence of the house (among other things) confuses matters, and Ackroyd has to intervene. This is all very well, of course, but what are Palmer and Dee up to in their separate ages that makes them figures of interest? There, as Dee's contemporary Shakespeare said, is the rub. And as it turns out, to no one's surprise, the two of them have some similar issues to deal with. Both lose their fathers, have problematic relationships with men who join them in business, and discover that they have lived without love for far too long. However, while Palmer seems to flail around looking for some sense of purpose, Dee spends his time trying to talk to spirits and create new life in a test tube. Goodness gracious. Ackroyd has declared that the true subject of all his fiction is the city of London (which makes his directions hard to follow if you don't happen to live there), but even without knowing just where Wapping is or how long it takes to get to the Historical Library, the author's sense of place adds a tremendous amount to the story. For one thing, even with all the shouting vendors and animals and mud, the city is a much more comprehensible place in John Dee's time than in Matthew Palmer's - twentieth-century London is a nighttime city in this novel, full of blinding neon and roads you can't see to the end. So it makes a certain amount of sense that Palmer feels lost while Dee has a plan, however bizarre. On the other hand, Dee might feel himself a little too much in control for his own good; it takes a major domestic catastrophe to humble him and make him realize that his world could be much larger and warmer than he allowed it to be. The tricky part with this so