A novel of three London lives is a camp, clever tour
de force, says Mark Sanderson.
Peter Ackroyd, whose latest
novel is 'Three Brothers' Photo: Jason Alden / Rex
Features
By Mark
Sanderson
Harry, Dan and Sam Hanway were born – in successive years in the Sixties – on the same date and at the same time:
noon on May 8. In other words, they are midday’s children. What they lack in
brotherly love they make up for in a psychic connection that ensures they grow
into “the strangest boys in the world”.
When their mother deserts them, their father, a failed writer turned
nightwatchman, leaves the boys pretty much to themselves. The Camden lads never
speak about this cataclysm, which hits young Sam the hardest. He spends his days
and nights wandering the streets of London, seeing things that aren’t there,
and working in a long-vanished convent. Meanwhile, Harry and Dan, both bitten by
ambition, climb the greasy poles of careers in Fleet
Street and Cambridge.
Anyone who knows anything about Ackroyd will immediately realise that all
three boys are avatars of their creator. London made him and he has remade
London in his own image. He even appears in a visitation Harry has in Limehouse:
“A settlement of round huts, created out of mud and straw, had once been raised
here by the river… The same sounds, and the same voices, had come from these
frail huts… Now someone called out, 'Peter! Peter!’”
Three Brothers is an alternative autobiography, a ghost
story and a murder
mystery all in one slim volume. Dickens, Blake and Eliot – all subjects of lives by Ackroyd –
cast shadows over the three-ply narrative that is full of chance and
coincidence, “alliances and affinities”, “contenders and young pretenders”,
shape-shifters and shirt-lifters.
Offended? Then this clever, camp novel – which includes a chapter titled
“Sausage Land” – is definitely not for you. Indeed the only sympathetic
character in the whole gallery of grotesques is a light-fingered rent-boy known
as Spark or Sparkle.
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