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the complete review - biography

Chaucer

by
Peter Ackroyd

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B- : intriguing, but ultimately unsatisfying

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  No consensus, but not exactly overwhelmed

  From the Reviews:

• " Geoffrey Chaucer is a figure who eludes the biographer's grasp even more fully than Shakespeare. (...) The tools for understanding Chaucer are literary history, philology and the history of patronage and court politics in the 14th century. None of these disciplines is Ackroyd's strong suit. (...) Paradoxically, the very brevity of this book makes it seem tired. (...) Here, the writing is sloppy and the thinking slack." - Jonathan Bate, Daily Telegraph
  
  
• "Ackroyd's brief survey is measured, dutiful, and frequently dull -- too sketchy to be useful to the initiated and too dry to captivate the novice." - Troy Patterson, Entertainment Weekly
  
  
• "Ackroyd is thoroughly at home in the medieval period, and his hunches about the cruxes of Chaucer's life are as persuasive as his literary judgments" - John Dugdale, The Guardian
  
  
• "The alarmingly prolific Mr. Ackroyd can be casual to the point of carelessness, tossing off random observations right and left, some of them penetrating, others inane." - William Grimes, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "It is not a grand literary experiment in the manner of Dickens (1990) but a Life that cheerfully admits the intervening centuries have rendered the great 14th-century poet somewhat wraithlike." - Stephen Butler, Sunday Telegraph
  
  
• "Peter Ackroyd's Chaucer weaves the life records into a lively biography that will amuse the general reader with its story, and the experts with the gaffes that reveal he is not a subject specialist." - Ad Putter, Times Literary Supplement

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Peter Ackroyd's Chaucer -- the first in what is apparently meant to be an 'Ackroyd's brief lives'-series -- is a slim, manageable biography of the great poet. It offers a decent overview and introduction -- but unfortunately not much of a life-story.
       The fault lies largely in the fact that 14th-century poet Chaucer didn't leave much of a paper trail, beyond his work. Ackroyd tries his damnedest to piece together what Chaucer did and where he went, but, again and again, he is reduced to mentioning the lawsuits Chaucer was involved in -- the only documentation that seems even moderately well-preserved. (Unfortunately, even these aren't very interesting: beyond mentioning the parties and amounts involved there's little to these records.)
       Ackroyd sets the context and the scene -- what life in England of those times was like -- well, and suggests Chaucer's role in and reaction to the major events of the times (the political upheavals, the plague). Chaucer was close to the court (as was his wife -- their generally long-distance relationship being one of the many, many mysteries Ackroyd mentions but can only hypothesise about) and held some significant positions, both as diplomat abroad and in England. Ackroyd does his best to suggest what Chaucer's responsibilities might have been and what he might have been faced with, but almost all is little more than speculation.
       Ackroyd is on a bit more solid ground in tracing Chaucer's career as poet, here at least having considerable more material to work with. He offers some interesting thoughts on possible influences -- and personal contacts -- and the like, but avoids making the poetry the centre of the book, trying to focus on the life. Unfortunately, he also gets carried away with some broad pronouncements, such as the preposterous:

The Canterbury Tales is so inclusive a poem that fictional characters become real and real people become fictional.

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Links:

• Doubleday publicity page

• BookLoons
• The Guardian (scroll down for review)
• The New York Times Book Review
• PopMatters
• ricklibrarian
• The Washington Times

• Chaucer MetaPage

• Peter Ackroyd at the British Council
• Peter Ackroyd page at The Guardian

• The Clerkenwell Tales
• Milton in America
• The Plato Papers

• See Index of Biographical works under review

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About the Author:

       English author Peter Ackroyd was born in 1949. He has written numerous novels and several literary biographies.

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