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Overview
Fakes, forgeries and plagiarism abound in Ackroyd’s brilliant historical novel, set in the 19th century during the excavation of the Bronze Age site of Troy.
“I cannot wait to bring you to the plain of Troy. To show you the place where Hector and Achilles fought. To show you the palace of Priam. And the walls where the Trojan women watched their warriors in battle with the invader. It will stir your blood, Sophia.”
Sophia Chrysanthis is only 16 when the German archaeologist, Herr Obermann, comes wooing: he wants a Greek bride who knows her Homer. Sophia passes his test, and soon she is tying canvas sacking to her legs so that she can kneel on the hard ground in the trench, removing the earth methodically, identifying salient points, lifting out amphorae and bronze vessels without damaging them.
“Archaeology is not a science,” Obermann says. “It is an art.”
Obermann is very good at the art of archaeology — perhaps too good at it. The atmosphere at Troy is tense and mysterious. Sophia finds herself increasingly baffled by the past . . . not only the remote past that Obermann is so keen to share with her in the form of his beloved epics of the Trojan wars, but also his own, recent past — a past that he has chosen to hide from her.
But she, too, is very good at the art of archaeology . . .
Synopsis
Heinrich Obermann, a celebrated German archaeologist, has uncovered the ancient ruins of Troy on a Turkish hillside. He fervently believes that his discovery will prove that the heroes of the Iliad, a work he has cherished all his life, actually existed. Sophia, Obermann’s young Greek wife, works at the site carefully preserving the ancient treasures she uncovers. But Sophia soon comes to see another side of her husband. He is mysteriously vague about his past and the wife he claims died years before. When she finds a cache of artefacts Obermann has hidden away, her suspicions about him rise, feelings that escalate when a visiting archaeologist who questions Obermann’s methods dies from a mysterious fever. The arrival of a second, equally sceptical archaeologist brings Sophia’s doubts to a head—and spurs Obermann to make even greater claims about the evidence he has found and the profound importance of his achievements.
In The Fall of Troy, Peter Ackroyd again demonstrates his ability to evoke time and place, and to transform history into compelling fiction. Like the Homeric epics that entrance Obermann, The Fall of Troy is in part accurate, in part fantastic. It is a brilliantly told story of heroes and scoundrels, human aspirations and follies, and the temptation to shape the truth to fit a passionately held belief.
The New York Times - David Leavitt
Peter Ackroyd belongs to another age. The author of more than a dozen novels, as well as volumes of poetry, plays and miscellaneous works of nonfiction, he recalls a time when it was commonplace for writers not merely to be prolific but to exhibit a sometimes bewildering catholicity of interest. In addition to biographies of Shakespeare, Dickens, T. S. Eliot and the city of London, he has written a book on transvestism and children's guides to ancient Greece and Rome. Most of his novels are historical, depicting figures as diverse as Milton, Chatterton and Oscar Wilde. Now, in The Fall of Troy, he turns his attention to the 19th-century German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, whose quest to discover the ancient city of Troy becomes the occasion for a novel that is engaging, disturbing, intellectually complex and just a little kitschy.
Editorials
David Leavitt
Peter Ackroyd belongs to another age. The author of more than a dozen novels, as well as volumes of poetry, plays and miscellaneous works of nonfiction, he recalls a time when it was commonplace for writers not merely to be prolific but to exhibit a sometimes bewildering catholicity of interest. In addition to biographies of Shakespeare, Dickens, T. S. Eliot and the city of London, he has written a book on transvestism and children's guides to ancient Greece and Rome. Most of his novels are historical, depicting figures as diverse as Milton, Chatterton and Oscar Wilde. Now, in The Fall of Troy, he turns his attention to the 19th-century German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, whose quest to discover the ancient city of Troy becomes the occasion for a novel that is engaging, disturbing, intellectually complex and just a little kitschy.—The New York Times
Library Journal
Middle-aged German bachelor of means seeks mail-order Greek bride to assist in the archaeological search for the lost city of Troy. At first glance, the premise of this novel requires a stretch of the imagination. But in the hands of an experienced writer such as Ackroyd (The Lambs of London), all of the sights and sounds and events are entirely plausible. Without wasting space on descriptive prose, the dialog paints the landscape and propels the action of the relatively few characters that inhabit the story. Central is Herr Heinrich Obermann, the German archaeologist and new bridegroom, who is both boisterous and audacious in a Teddy Roosevelt meets P.T. Barnum kind of way. Packed with references to the legends of the gods and goddesses, this unexpectedly humorous novel moves quite rapidly while at the same time slowly unearthing a mystery. Like an antiquity that might be found among the stones, this book is a small gem in the impressive pantheon of Ackroyd's work, which encompasses fiction, nonfiction, biography, and poetry. Recommended for academic and large literary fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ7/07.]
—Susanne Wells