A failed kiss of life

For a writer or critic to describe something as ‘interesting’ is, of course, neither revealing nor interesting. Which is a shame, for Peter Ackroyd is rather fond of this sort of information underload: Richard II is ‘perhaps the most interesting and mysterious of English sovereigns’; the putative affair between Chaucer’s wife and John of Gaunt ‘would throw an interesting light upon his characteristic irony and detachment’; the actual affair between her sister and John of Gaunt ‘throws an interesting light upon the nature of the royal household’, and so on.

Ackroyd is at least right to have an interest in Chaucer, whose well-documented professional and personal history provides plenty of material for a ‘litel tretys’ such as this. Surviving records denote a life of epochal eventfulness for a figure truly representative of his period: a diplomat and civil servant, a magistrate and alleged rapist, the de facto laureate poet for a coalescent nation. He proves a worthy first subject for this new series in which Ackroyd — with trademark ambition — seeks to ‘bring to life some of the most important men and women in the history of the world’.

However, it is unfortunate that this attempt at revitalisation can only take place within Ackroyd’s distinctly unlively prose. His apparent mastery of the ill-turned phrase has various manifestations: there is schoolbook exhortation (‘certain biographers have suggested that he met Boccaccio and Petrarch on this journey, but this is also unlikely. What would he have said to them if he had met them?’) and schoolboy padding (‘he constantly modified his poetic language to accomplish a wide range of effects’). There is quibbling qualification: ‘he must, in the common phrase, have laid low and waited for the storm to pass’ or ‘The Canterbury Tales is in many respects almost an impersonal work’.