Obermann’s wife, Sophia, plays a central role in the story. Like Schliemann’s third bride, Sophia marries Obermann after he writes a letter to a friend in Greece asking for a woman who is both young and a fan of Homer. She is duly given away by her parents and accompanies him to the excavation site.
For a while, like Sophia, the reader is swept up in the drama of Obermann’s forthright, romantic personality. Every- thing he says is said with certainty. He quotes Homer as if he himself belongs to the world described by the poet, gods and all.
All this feels credible enough: it was the real-life Schliemann’s close reading of The Iliad that brought about his great archaeological coup. Similarly, Obermann’s boundless belief in himself (and in Homer) is the source of his success and, for a time, it accounts for the attractive early chapters of the novel, even if at times we feel we are being seduced by a caricature.
Slowly, a more sinister side of Obermann emerges. ‘He regards archaeology,’ as one character puts it in a letter, ‘as a tool for his theories, and has absolutely no regard for evidence.’ He also has a troubling past that he conceals from Sophia. In order to get what he wants, it seems, he will stop at nothing.
This is something Obermann shares with the fiction itself. Ackroyd wants his plot to unfold in a certain predetermined way, and will let nothing deflect him. We can hear the machinery clanking. Storms approach at portentous moments. Horses carrying heroines through hostile landscapes duly flare their nostrils. Earthquakes trigger happy, timely discoveries. Secondary characters die of mysterious ailments, and owls hoot in response to pagan prayers.
It is all quite deliberate, of course. Ackroyd wants to produce a stimulating confusion between the ponderous literalism of modern reality and the disturbing enchantment of ancient belief systems. He wants to create a tension between Obermann the visionary and Obermann the crook, the fraudster, the bully. Whom or what are we to believe?
Unfortunately, none of it. By the time Sophia, late in the novel, rationalises her understanding of what has happened by saying, ‘otherwise, there is too much coincidence’, the reader has already swallowed more than his share of coincidence.
As ever, Ackroyd’s real interest seems to lie away from the moment-by-moment convincingness of real human beings with real motivations and more with the extraordinary narrative sweep of ideas played out in history. This interest in overarching themes, combined with his intense curiosity about the minutiae of culture, makes him a vivid biographer and historian. It does not, however, qualify him for success as a novelist. He is like a great, thumping tennis player who turns his hand to squash only to find he doesn’t have the necessary flick of the wrist.
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