"True books are filled with the pow­er of the un­der­stand­ing which is the in­her­itance of the ages: you may take up a book in time, but you read it in eter­ni­ty.”

Matthew Palmer inherits a house in a hidden part of Clerkenwell, London. When Matthew moves into the house, he begins to suffer visions in an escalating derangement of mind. Matthew delves into the history of the house and discovers that it had been owned in the Tudor era by Doctor John Dee, an infamous alchemist, mathematician and philosopher who was accused by some of using black magic.

The narrative consists of two first-person accounts, one Palmer’s, the other, Dee’s. For just as Palmer sees Dee, so Dee ‘scries’ Palmer, and the narratives of two men searching the past begin to interlock. Palmer researches old documents looking for the truth of his parenthood; Dee investigates the ancient city of London he believes to be buried underground. Both investigations lead to unexpected discoveries.

This is my second novel by the author having previously read 'The Lambs of London' so in some respects I knew what to expect. Doctor Dee was a real life person so this was going to be a biography, the real world colliding with the fictitious world, it is going to be a more of the dark and gloomy London than what the tourist of today is going to see with its Tudor smells and noises. In this respect this book doesn't disappoint.

However, it also has its flaws IMHO. Ackroyd adapts Dee’s own language to make it more accessible to the modern reader whilst retaining the rich style of the original. In comparison Matthew’s language seems rather dull in comparison meaning that whilst I enjoyed the Tudor half of this novel the half that takes place some 400+ years later held little interest for me. On the whole I found it rather muddled and this was particularly true of the final chapter. ( )

As with all things Ackroyd, this novel suffers from not only an obsession with London now, but, as if that wasn’t ethnocentric enough, London then.

Even though it’s been 8 years since he published Hawksmoor, he’s still playing the same old riff. Any reader coming to Ackroyd for the first time is going to find it enchanting to consider the same geographical space inhabited by characters centuries apart. But for those who’ve already gone through it, it starts to get a bit tired.

This is particularly because Dee, like Hawksmoor before it, doesn’t really communicate why Ackroyd has to draw parallels in the space-time continuum. I think most of us have enough imagination to realise that there were people who lived many years ago where we are sitting right now who may have had things in common with us. And?

The eponymous Doctor Dee did actually exist as a polymath alchemist-cum-philosopher. It’s interesting to read about him, and the Tudor era parts are very well written.

Why on earth we have to bother coming back to the modern day is lost on me. Nothing of any consequence seems to happen there, and nothing is of any interest whatsoever. I have no idea why Ackroyd just doesn’t stay in the past. He’s much better at it.

Towards the end, it all kind of falls apart a bit as Ackroyd gaze gets more and more captivated by his navel (more parallels with Hawksmoor), and by then most readers will be glad to find it doesn’t last much longer. ( )

Two storylines – Matthew has inherited a house from his father in the current day (book was published in the early 90s), and there is a brief mystery in figuring out whom it once belonged to. Turns it out, Doctor John Dee once lived there (during the time of Queen Elizabeth’s reign in the 16th century). No idea what the Doctor Dee storyline was all about.

This was incredibly boring, especially the Dee storyline. I have no idea what happened in that part except that (I think) his wife, Katherine, was sick. He was apparently a doctor (and possibly a “sorcerer” of some type?). Anyway, not really worth the time, in my opinion. ( )

Ever since Pynchon's V, ambitious authors have hoped that shuffling various narrative platforms would reveal something greater, some gestalthinting at a reincarnation of the imagination. The House of Doctpr Dee is not one of the btter examples of this experiment. ( )

I must admit to not being a Peter Ackroyd fan. I read his breakthrough novel Hawksmoor, quite a while ago and while I appreciated his ability to create tensions in time and space by the juxtaposition of two story threads: one in the past and one in the present, I felt that he was more concerned in creating a sense of place and an atmosphere of a part of London that fascinates him than he was in telling the story. I found some of his writing a little pedantic and struggled to maintain my interest through the novel. It just somehow didn’t work. I have also read his poetry collection The diversions of Purley, and other poems and found a similar difficulty in getting involved with the author. The House of Doctor Dee in my opinion is a step up in both the story telling aspects and his writing style, somehow his writing has lost some of its density, which made it much easier for me to become involved in the novel and to appreciate his ability to conjure up the links between two different periods of time.

It has to be said that Ackroyd plays fast and loose with historical accuracy. Dr John Dee’s main residence was at Mortlake in South West London and it was here at the turn of the sixteenth century that his prodigious library was vandalised, this fact does not get in Ackroyd’s way of wanting to maintain his love affair with the streets of East London and so he transpose Dee’s residence to Clerkenwell in East central London. He tells the story of John Dee’s obsession with magic and his relationship with Edward Kelly a shady character who is best described as a mountebank, Its a kind of master pupil relationship, but with hazy lines as to who is in control. with the aid of a crystal ball they are attempting to divine the future and Dr Dee who uses Kelly as a medium is also attempting to create a homunculus. The novel starts with a story from the present: Mathew Palmer has inherited a house in Clerkenwell, he is an archivist and historian and soon realises that it is the house of John Dee and it has a strange fascination from the moment he sees it. He has a friend Daniel Moore and both men are steeped in archival work and are a little solitary although Moore seems to be the more senior figure. The two stories are told in the first person and in alternate chapters and it is Dr Dee’s old house that makes the initial connection. Mathew feels a presence in the house at times he can almost see Dr Dee as he explores the basement where Dee did some of his work. Edward Kelly scrying with the crystal ball at one point says he sees two men in strange costumes calling each other Mathew and Daniel.

The relationships in both stories are fraught with difficulties. Dr Dee has implicit faith in Edward Kelly, but reluctantly starts to doubt his motives. His wife and servants both warn him that Kelly is a crook, only working with Dee to gain access to his work in alchemy, magic and the homunculus. Kelly is accused by the servants of poisoning Dr Dee’s wife. Dee himself becomes convinced that he is about to discover some sort of portal that will take him back to a time of London’s glorious past. Mathew Palmer glimpses his friend Daniel in a cross dressing establishment and then learns that he was his fathers lover and that he himself may have been molested by his father. He has an uneasy relationship with his mother only starting to realise the reasons for her estrangement from her husband. His mother cannot bear to be in the house in Clerkenwell sensing that it was a place where activities took place that she cannot face. A house then with many secrets that seems to give glimpses of a past and a future. Troubled relationships, magic, sex, murder provide a heady brew that permeates the house in Clerkenwell and the two stories describe a palimpsest, where a curtain between the past and the present quivers; always threatening to open up.

I like the way Ackroyd writes about Elizabethan times, he creates an atmosphere and feel for the period by using language and a style of writing that evokes those times. The reader usually knows when he is in the sixteenth century or more recent times, however Ackroyd does not quite achieve this with his present day story, his nostalgia for the past seems to carry him back to a London in the 1950’s. Troubled psyches perhaps tend to dream, even have visions and Ackroyd uses these to enhance the tension in the lives of his characters. Dr Dee and Mathew are both in fear of what they might find, but their quest for knowledge keeps them pushing for answers. Dr Dee has his religious faith to bolster his spirits, even when searching for angels, but this is something that Mathew lacks in present times and this is an interesting juxtaposition between the two stories.

Ghosts, visions, dreams in two parallel stories can provide novelists with difficulties to reconcile, but the reader is not disappointed in this book. Ackroyd lets his two stories speak for themselves and the reader can make the connections that the author clearly signposts. At the end of the book, Ackroyd can’t resist blurring the lines between himself and the first person character of John Dee that he has created. He asks:
“ And what is the past after all? is it that that is created in the formal act of writing, or does it have some substantial reality. Am I discovering it or inventing it? or could it be that I am Discovering it within myself, so that it bears both the authenticity of surviving evidence and the immediacy of present intuition? The House of Doctor Dee leads me to that conclusion……”

There is mystery, there is atmosphere and even a resolution of sorts and some brilliant evocative writing that kept this reader enthralled throughout the whole novel. The best thing that I have read by Peter Ackroyd (perhaps I need to do some re-reading) and so 4.5 stars. ( )