Review by New York Times Review
PETER ACKROYD'S NEW book begins like a fairy tale: "In the London borough of Camden, in the middle of the last century, there lived three brothers." And a wondrous set of boys they are, having been born at precisely midday on May 8 of three successive years. This coincidence - only the first of many in Ackroyd's breezy contrivance of a novel - signals an "invisible communion" among the brothers that will link their fates even as they set out on radically different paths through life. In the end, true to the Grimm Brothers template, only one will endure his personal ordeal and emerge relatively unscathed; the other two wind up succumbing to the wiles of the true hero of the piece - the city of London itself, the only character in the book the author actually seems to care about. That London plays such a central role in "Three Brothers" will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Peter Ackroyd's work. Over a career spanning dozens of volumes of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, criticism and biography, he has made the city something of a personal specialty, most notably in his excellent 800-page portrait, "London: The Biography." In "Three Brothers," a shorter book by far, his ambitions are more modest, but the themes he sounds are very much the same - that past and present coexist, sometimes uneasily, on every street corner in town, and that the city's dense concatenation of rich and poor, predators and victims, the living and the dead, is what generates the endlessly surprising narratives of urban life. It's too bad he yokes these resonant ideas to a team of such flimsy and schematic characters. The three brothers of the title - Harry, Daniel and Sam Hanway - prove to be as neatly contrasting (speaking of fairy tales) as the three bowls of porridge Goldilocks samples or the triad of houses built by those harried little pigs. Harry, the oldest brother, is the sociable go-getter of the family; his vice is relentless ambition, embodied in his single-minded drive to reach the top in London's newspaper business. ("You like to devour, don't you?" his boss observes at one point. "Money. Power. It's all the same to you, Harry.") His brother Daniel, on the other hand, is the resident intellectual snob, bound for Cambridge and a life of literary one-upmanship, eager to get as far from his humble council-estate roots as he can. ("The people here are so common," he confides to his diary as a boy. "None of them have any manners. God, they sicken me with their boring opinions.") Only Sam, the youngest brother, seems more than a mere incarnation of abstract qualities. The misfit dreamer of the Hanway clan, he finds no easy route to worldly success, as his brothers do, but merely drifts from one menial job to the next, not unhappy so much as perpetually bemused by the countless ghosts and historical echoes at large in the city. It's Sam who ultimately makes contact with their mother, a shadowy presence who vanished without explanation when the boys were 8, 9 and 10 years old, abandoning them to the care of a distant father. One day, years after her disappearance, Sam sees her in a church and follows her back to the South London brothel where she now lives and works. But while Sam is more than willing to let his mother back into his life, Harry and Daniel, entirely caught up in their own pursuits, can't be bothered to reconnect with a past they've both rejected. The plot Ackroyd sets in motion - abounding with political corruption, sexual scandal and even a nasty little murder - plays out against the backdrop of London in the 1960s and 70s, and ultimately twists around to ensnare all three brothers and their mother as well. At the center of it stand two pivotal figures: a slumlord named Asher Ruppta and a small-time thief calling himself Sparkler, both of whom turn out to be connected to the Hanways by a series of coincidences that would make even Dickens blush. But that is precisely Ackroyd's point. Coincidence, as one character lectures another, "is the condition of living in the city, is it not? The most heterogeneous elements collide. Because, you see, everything is connected to everything else." WE DO SEE. But just to make certain, Ackroyd drives home the point - in an earlier paragraph that seems to cry out for the reader's yellow highlighter - by rehearsing his favorite image of London as a complex network of associations, "a web so taut and tightly drawn that the slightest movement of any part sent reverberations through the whole. A chance encounter might lead to terrible consequences, and a misheard word bring unintended good fortune." In "Three Brothers," the tremors sent across London's far-reaching web ultimately lift some characters to redemption and lead others to ignominious death. But Ackroyd, who seems to be dabbling here, filling time between more substantial projects, hasn't invested their doings with enough genuine life to make any of it seem consequential. Even the scenes of snide repartee among Daniel's bookish friends, which should have provided at least some fun, come off as joyless - all meanspirited cattiness and very little wit. You can just imagine what those Oxbridge backbiters would have made of this slight and perfiinctory effort from one of England's literary heavyweights. GARY KRIST is the author of "City of Scoundrels," "The White Cascade" and several works of fiction.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 20, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
You might know Ackroyd primarily as a biographer of literary masters, including Charles Dickens and T. S. Eliot. But back in the 1980s, Ackroyd's novels (Hawksmoor, etc.) were all the rage. His new novel is a strange, minimalist work of fiction set in midcentury London that lightly traces the lives of the Hanway brothers, all born on the same day at the same time, several years apart. The eldest is Harry, a soulless Fleet Street newspaperman investigating a political scandal. The middle brother is Daniel, a prickly academic who moonlights as a criminal accomplice in Soho. And the youngest, Sam unquestionably the novel's highlight is an opaque drifter who wanders the streets and gives his money to vagabonds. One brother quickly drifts into madness, wrought beautifully by Ackroyd's haunting prose: he speaks to nuns who aren't there, visits churches that disappear, and sees visions of moving stones. There's no high-concept premise, no suspenseful turns of plot, other than the mystery of the Hanways' mother and a few fateful intersections, but the crisp narrative is worth a read for Ackroyd's poetic flourishes and the images and atmospheres he conjures from London's dark streets.--Morgan, Adam Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Ackroyd follows the nonfiction Tudors with a characteristically sly novel juxtaposing the mundane and the mystical in 1960s London. The Hanways are a trio of brothers from working-class Camden Town; each was born in a different year, though all three were born on May 8 at noon. After their mother suddenly disappears, gregarious Harry, scholarly Daniel, and aimless Sam are raised by their emotionally absent father. As they take radically different paths in life, the brothers remain connected, less by affection than by what Ackroyd calls their "invisible communion." Each encounters the same people, including their mother, boorish newspaper baron Sir Martin Flaxman, slumlord Asher Ruppta, and ebullient thief and male prostitute Sparkler. Around them swirls modern London, full of political corruption, literary backbiting, and violence. Yet the London of the past lives on as well, evident in a seemingly ghostly convent, and in schoolyards, subway tunnels, and monuments that still vibrate with history. Each of the brothers seems to embody different aspects of Ackroyd's own biography-a segmentation that contributes to their oddly impersonal feel. In contrast, the author's beloved London comes across as warm, coherent, and triumphantly alive. In this city, Ackroyd writes, coincidence is everywhere, anything is possible, and "everything is connected to everything else." Agent: Geri Thoma, Writers House. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Ackroyd, a Guardian Fiction Prize and Whitbread award winner, British historian, and biographer, tells a tale of three brothers born in successive years to working-class parents in grimy postwar London. Though playmates in their youth, they grow apart after the painful but never discussed disappearance of their mother. Harry, the eldest, is outgoing and ambitious; Daniel, the middle son, bookish and gay; Sam, the youngest, a troubled loner. By the 1960s, when the bulk of the story takes place, the boys inhabit different universes. The unusual circumstance of their births, announced in the first paragraph of the novel (they all share the same birthday), hints at the surprising and lyrical touches of magical realism that will appear throughout. The theme of coincidence is strong, as, unbeknownst to them, the brothers' vastly different lives nonetheless revolve around the same few shady underworld characters. VERDICT -Ackroyd betrays a bleak view of humanity in his London of the swinging Sixties, populated by scheming, greedy murderers. With overtones of Greek tragedy and Charles Dickens, this is a literary and engrossing parable and a loving tribute to London in all its depravity. [See Prepub Alert, 9/9/13.]-Lauren Gilbert, Sachem P.L., Holbrook, NY (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The prize-winning British novelist, biographer and critic's intriguing if inconsistent latest is a stew of family saga, murder mystery, political conspiracy and tableau of London's history. Foregrounding the three Hanway boys, born in a working-class corner of the English capital in the mid-20th century, Ackroyd (The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, 2008, etc.) employs the city itself as both a flickering accumulation of its past and a setting for his small web of interconnected characters. The lives of the boys--Harry, Daniel and Sam--are suddenly disrupted by the disappearance of their mother, who, it later emerges, was sent to prison for soliciting. As they grow up, the young men's paths diverge significantly. Affable Harry rises quickly in the world of journalism and eventually marries a national newspaper proprietor's daughter. Clever, gay Daniel finds a future at Cambridge University and in the literary world, while Sam, a wandering, possibly visionary soul, helps vagrants, rediscovers his mother--now a madam in a brothel--and becomes a rent collector for notorious slum landlord Asher Ruppta, a character who connects all three brothers. With its echoes of Charles Dickens and the angry young men of the 1950s, and its population of caricatures and ghosts, Ackroyd's short novel maintains a patchy course, passing through gothic flourishes to reach an open-ended conclusion. At times humdrum and perfunctory, at others fantastical, this genre-spanning novel offers lightweight bookish entertainment.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
