| Peter Ackroyd: Bringing My Favorite Pilgrims Back to Life |
December 20, 2010
Peter Ackroyd is an industrious writer, having published in just the last ten years five works of fiction and nineteen of nonfiction (including Venice: Pure City, a must read on my list of books to read in 2011). Luckily for us, he also found the time to translate -- or as he calls it "retell" -- The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. In his introduction to this marvelous retelling of the six-hundred year-old verse story of diverse pilgrims on their way to Canterbury who meet one night and tell their funny and wicked personal stories, Ackroyd writes that translating the collection of tales into "contemporary English is another way of affirming its centrality and its continuing life. It is reborn in every generation." The tales are central to understanding our place in the world, both as inheritors of the medieval world so thoroughly depicted in the tales and as holders of the same human characteristics of greed, fear, and desire that the pilgrims exhibit in their stories. What makes the stories of Chaucer so great is that while the medieval world of the pilgrims is very different from our own modern universe, their place in the world -- how they understand themselves -- will resonate as both familiar and understandable. The pilgrims are not so very different from people we know, including the people we know best, ourselves.
Everyone who has read The Canterbury Tales has their favorite character in the wide-ranging cast of pilgrims (whether that character be their mirror or their opposite, a beloved soul or a repellant one). Readers new to the tales, encountering these characters for the first time through Ackroyd's retelling, will have a great time picking out their own best-loved figures, from the handsome monk "who was supposed to follow the rule of saint Benedict ... but found the precepts antiquated and altogether too strict; he preferred to follow the modern fashions of good living and good drinking" or the Merchant "with his forked beard ...What a notable man! Funnily enough, I did not discover his name. I never bothered to ask him." There is the pardoner, who carries in a sack "papal pardons smoking hot from Rome" and offers seven hundred years indulgence for seven shillings -- heaven at a cheap price. Too bad he can't take some money to fix up his hair, "yellow as old wax, hanging down his back as limply as a bundle of flax and draped across his shoulders ... He could have had rats' tails upon his head." My favorite character is the good wife of Bath, whose "stockings were of a vivid red and tightly laced; her leather shoes were supple and of the newest cut. Her face was red, too, and she had a very bold look." And bold tongue: when we hear her tale, she wields the language of sex freely and with pride and desire: "All of us have different talents - some can do this, others can do that. I can do that." Does it, she does, and we hear all about it.
Ackroyd has taken the lovely, lively, incisive, bawdy, and provoking language of Chaucer and translated it for modern readers to enjoy all over again. For new inductees into the reading of Chaucer, his retelling will ensure their long stay in the hall of admiration and delight, and for those already familiar with the tales, the retelling will reaffirm our affection and our identification with these wonderful tales.
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| November 28, 2008
Peter Ackroyd's Newton (published in 2006) is a somewhat boring rendition of the really amazing life of Isaac Newton. With such a character as Newton, a truly quirky and eccentric genius, the story of his life -- especially told briefly as Ackroyd hawks his biographies as "Ackroyd's Brief Lives" -- should have been fast-paced and absolutely awe-inspiring, with no yawns induced at all. Let me try:
Newton was born on Christmas Morning 1642 into the yeoman class: his family owned a manor house, some land, and had tenants working on the land. He was so sickly and weak that it was doubted he would last the night but he did. His father had died months before and so the baby was given his name: Isaac. Ackroyd writes: "It is the usual familial chemistry of male children who go on to distinguish themselves" that the mother is from more genteel background than the father. I am not disputing this, but really Mr. Ackroyd? Anyone else you'd care to mention?
Anyway, back to Sir Isaac. His mother remarried and the new husband insisted that Isaac be left behind in the manor house with his grandmother. Living a solitary life alone there with granny he began his lifelong talent of observation. Observing and learning, he walked through the countryside and sat beneath the trees, looking up at the sky, wondering and thinking. Eventually he sat until an apple fell and sparked in him the genius notion of universal gravity. By this time he was at Trinity College, Cambridge University, and his great mind was being recognized by all who came to teach him and work with him. He was touchy about any criticism and he could hold a grudge; he would rather keep his experiments and observations and genius deductions to himself rather than expose them to a world that would steal and criticize and not appreciate just how damn smart he was. Newton built whatever equipment he needed to prove his propositions and he was meticulous and dogged and demanding. He did not believe himself to be wrong often and he wasn't; even if his calculations were off, his propositions were correct. His observations on universal gravitation and the three laws of motion were brilliant and began the scientific revolution that we are still living today, with our knowledge of space and time expanding out from his observations and deductions.
Newton studied alchemy, biblical texts, light and planets and comets, and he used the method of "observe, record and deduce", using mathematical equations to prove what needed proving. Ackroyd gets it right when he states: "Newton created a system of the universe - of force and inertia and mass, of action and reaction - that remains unsurpassed in its reliability and efficiency" and his methods of observation, deduction and calculation are still used today.
What Newton always had and never lost was a strong curiosity that raised questions about things he observed and the discipline to answer those questions through hard work. His curiosity was of the natural and mystical world; his questions were practical as well as spiritual. His curiosity never waned, his observations never stopped, he went on seeing and thinking and wondering his whole life. Curiosity plus a rigorous mind: that is what we should want for ourselves, for our political leaders, for our children, for writers and film makers and artists and banker, lawyers, librarians, teachers. For everyone.
Newton is known for his "reason" but in fact his wondrous mind went way beyond what was reasonable; he sought the answers to the universe while always remaining in awe of the universe. He never sought to master the universe but rather to revere it by seeking to understand the amazing way it all works. Ackroyd ends with lines by Alexander Pope and they are good ones for me to end with also:
Nature and Nature's Laws lay hid in night;
God said, Let Newton be! And All was Light.
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