The Fall of Troy by Peter Ackroyd (PDF)

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Ebook Info

  • Published: 2008
  • Number of pages: 212 pages
  • Format: PDF
  • File Size: 0.78 MB
  • Authors: Peter Ackroyd

Description

In The Fall of Troy, acclaimed novelist and historian Peter Ackroyd creates a fascinating narrative that follows an archaeologist’s obsession with finding the ruins of Troy, depicting the blurred line between truth and deception.Obermann, an acclaimed German scholar, fervently believes that his discovery of the ancient ruins of Troy will prove that the heroes of the Iliad, a work he has cherished all his life, actually existed. But Sophia, Obermann’s young Greek wife, has her suspicions about his motivations — suspicions that only increase when she finds a cache of artifacts that her husband has hidden, and when a more skeptical archaeologist dies from a mysterious fever. With exquisite detail, Ackroyd again demonstrates his ability to evoke time and place, creating 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.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “Engaging, disturbing, intellectually complex.” —The New York Times Book Review“Engaging . . . sly, witty. . . . [A] novel that meditates on literature and idealism and the uses and misuses of both.” —Los Angeles Times“This is Ackroyd’s most exuberant novel for years…”—Daily Mail“Provoking, unsettling, ingenious—and a delight to read.”—Barry Unsworth, The Guardian“Written in clipped, precise, instantly recognizable prose, The Fall of Troy is a novel about opposites—of truth and deception, fact and fiction, history and romance, love and loyalty.…But however you read The Fall of Troy—as a love story and mystery told in Homeric style, or as a deeper meditation on the relationship between reality and imagination—Ackroyd the novelist re-emerges triumphantly from the mud of his excavations.”—The Times“The Fall of Troy is a clever variation on the story of the excavation of the city in the 1850s.…There is another layer, however, to this tale of fakes, falsehood and deception. For Ackroyd is playing throughout his novel with the status of his own narrative as a work of fiction…there are unsettling surprises as the story dances between pure Ackroyd and the fantasies of Schliemann, and a treacherous middle-ground in between.…Peter Ackroyd’s invention trumps even Schliemann’s mendacity.”—Times Literary Supplement“[Ackroyd’s] evocation of the landscape, the weather and the conditions of the Hissarlik dig are brilliant, and his minor characters…are deftly brought to life. Above all, he manages to suggest, in a book which is less slight than it may appear, that men who meddle with the gods do so at their peril.”—Sunday Telegraph“Ingenious…briskly told and vividly realized tale…a gripping novel.”—Daily Express About the Author Peter Ackroyd (CBE) is a master of the historical novel: The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde won the Somerset Maugham Award; Hawksmoor was awarded both the Whitbread Novel of the Year and the Guardian Fiction Prize; and Chatterton was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His most recent historical novel was The Lambs of London. He is also the author of Shakespeare: The Biography and the Ackroyd’s Brief Lives series. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. OneHe fell down heavily on his knees, took her hand and brought it up to his mouth. “I kiss the hand of the future Mrs. Obermann.” He spoke in English. Neither she nor her parents understood German, and he disliked speaking demotic Greek. He considered it vulgar.Sophia Chrysanthis looked down at his bald head, and noticed a small scar. “You have been wounded, Heinrich.”“A fragment of the statue of Zeus. On the island of Ithaca. That is where I found the palace of Odysseus, the wanderer. I discovered the chamber where his wife, Penelope, had woven her endless tapestry. She was always faithful to him. You will be my Penelope, Sophia.”“I hope you do not travel as far as Odysseus.”“You will never leave my side.” He rose, with difficulty, and bowed to her parents, who were standing together by the window. “I will utter prayers for you every day. If I live to be a thousand years old, I will never forget you.” Outside, in the dusty light, the horses and carriages passed along the avenues; he glimpsed three women, holding up parasols to protect themselves from the bright sun of the early Athenian spring, chattering together as they walked upon the cobbles. They were dressed in pale green, with white veils and bonnets, and he knew at once that they were sisters. “This is an auspicious day. Your daughter will be a partner in my labours. She will be cherished by Greece.”“She has no greater desire than to be your wife, Herr Obermann.” Madame Chrysanthis gave a slight nod, as if making some formal remark for duty’s sake. “We have taught her that a wife is but the shadow of her husband.”“The women in Germany would not believe you.”“That is why you are not marrying a German.”Obermann laughed. He already knew that Madame was a formidable woman, and he hoped that her daughter had inherited her sterner virtues. “But my wife will be my partner in uncovering the lost past of her country. She will stand within the walls of Troy!”“Sophia has a passion for learning. That is true.” Colonel Chrysanthis deemed it necessary to enter the conversation: the future of his only child was, after all, being discussed. “Ever since your first letter to us she has been reading Homer to me.”“She draws up maps of the battle lines,” Madame Chrysanthis said.“This is all good. All excellent.” Obermann had once more taken Sophia by the hand. “She is another Athene, as learned as she is beautiful.”“I will not be a goddess, Heinrich.”“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, Agamemnon, and his soldiers. It will stir your blood, Sophia.”“It was a long time ago, Heinrich.”“Not for me. It is eternal. Beyond time.”“I do not know if I will be able to see so far.”“My wife will see everything.”***A few days earlier he had led her into the courtyard of the house, cool in the shadows of the evening, and sat with her on the marble bench there. “I must have you, Sophia. Once I have come to a conclusion I cannot be moved. I am unshakeable. As soon as I saw your photograph, I knew that I was yours.”“So you chose me without reason?”“We do things because we do them. There is no necessary explanation. Your Greek dramatists knew this. Homer knew it.”“I thought that you wanted me because I am a woman who reads Homer.”“That is a part of it. There we are already married. But there is also fate, Sophia. As hard and as desperate as life.”***The ceremony was conducted in the little church of Hagios Georgios, set back from the Odos Ermou in a small square, while the servants of the Chrysanthis household prepared the wedding feast. There was much discussion among them about the relative merits of bride and groom. The maids considered him too old for Sophia. She was in her mid–twenties, whereas Herr Obermann must be fifty, no, more than fifty. He would soon be stout, and he wore pebble glasses; he was short, too, with a great round head like a cannon ball.“He speaks too loud,” Maria Karmeniou said. “You can hear his voice booming through the house.”“It is the German manner,” Nikola Zannis explained. “They are strong. Impatient.”The butler and the valet took his part. Miss Chrysanthis was young—-and some even called her beautiful—but she had a shocking temper like her mother. She had been as sweet to him as the honey of Hybla, but they prophesied that this would not last long after the wedding night. It was agreed by all of them, however, that Herr Obermann must have paid a very large dowry for his new wife. And, for this, they were grateful. In recent months their employers had pared down costs so much that they had had little opportunity of cheating them.The feast itself was lavish, of course, with all the sweet pastries and dainty confections that are usual on such occasions. Obermann drank a great deal of wine, and even called out for Bavarian beer; but there was none on the premises. Then before the meal was over, against all custom, he stood up and made a speech. He began by praising the beauty of Greek women, as exemplified by Madame Chrysanthis, who had presided over the most charming meal since Aphrodite dined with Zephyrus and the Nereides. Her consort, the great man Colonel Chrysanthis, the pride of the National Patriotic Army, who had fought so valiantly against the Asiatics, was especially worthy of praise; but he deserved most thanks for producing out of his powerful loins his most splendid daughter. “Will you raise your glasses to the young lady whom I have the honour to call Frau Obermann?” He picked up his own glass for the toast. “She will be my comrade in the field. Thanks to the exertions of her parents, she is a lover of learning. She has been an admirer of the Homeric poems since her earliest childhood, and has expressed to me her heartfelt sympathy with my task. When I return to the plain of Troy, as I shall do very shortly, I shall take with me a blessing greater than the Palladion that protected the old city!” At this point he began to recite from memory the passage of the Iliad in which the goddess, flashing–eyed Athene, instils courage and hope into the breast of mighty Diomedes. Only Sophia could understand a word of the ancient Greek. The others listened in perplexed silence as Obermann continued his oration.When the meal was over, he danced wildly in the courtyard of the Chrysanthis house. Sophia stood with the other married women as he leaped into the air and threw out his arms, in imitation of the Turkish peasants whom he had seen in the small villages near Troy. He began to sweat dreadfully, and his bald head seemed to be melting in the rays of the afternoon sun. And Sophia thought, how can I love a man who dances so badly?That night, after he and Sophia had retired to the marital chamber—the bed strewn with flowers, according to custom—the servant on that floor was awakened by the sound of howling. She hurried down the corridor and put her ear to the door of the Obermanns’ chamber. The howling had stopped. But then she heard Herr Obermann singing, and there was a noise like that of feet banging on the wooden floor. She crossed herself, and went back to her room. She could not have known that this was a German marching song.***At breakfast the next morning, to her parents’ evident surprise, Sophia greedily consumed all the bread and dates in front of her; she ate the cheeses and the potted tongue, and even nibbled at the olives, which she normally despised. She had in the past condemned them as “peasant food,” but now she seemed to take a certain pleasure in biting into their taut black skin. Her husband ate very quickly, as was his habit, looking around at the others with wary eyes. He devoured his food as if it were about to be snatched from him. Now, for the first time, Sophia remonstrated with him. “You will do harm to your constitution, Heinrich. You eat too fast.”“There is nothing wrong with my constitution. I am tough. I am energetic. Who else do you know to swim in the sea at dawn? Or ride an hour before breakfast?” He rose early each morning and greeted the rising sun, stretching out his arms and welcoming “the rosy–fingered dawn,” rhododaktulos eos; then he would ride down to the harbour at Cophos and plunge into the waters of the Saronic Gulf, to the amusement of the sailors and fishermen, who did not consider the sea to be a place of recreation. “And who are you to advise me about my health, Sophia? You drink too much coffee. It poisons the kidneys. Our children will be dwarves.”“Do you wish to see the Gazette?” the colonel asked him.“No. It is barbaric Greek. Wait. Let me read the shipping news.”***He grew less courteous to his parents–in–law in the days immediately after the wedding; with his wife, he also seemed less restrained. The struggle was over. He had gained, as always, the object he desired. It soon became clear, too, that he was impatient to leave. Every morning he looked in the shipping columns, to discover what ships had arrived and departed from Piraeus. He received telegrams every day from Constantinople and Kannakale; he read them eagerly, and tore them into little pieces. Then, at the end of their first week of marriage, he had visited the shipping agent and booked himself and his wife on the passage by steam–boat to the Dardanelles.When he informed Sophia of this decision, she wept.“Come now,” he said, “this is your new life.”“I have never left Greece before, Heinrich. You must allow me a few tears.”“It is only natural in a woman. I grant you that. But Frau Obermann does not shed tears.”She looked at him for a moment, then wiped her eyes. “You will never see them again.”“Good. And now to business. We leave on Monday morning aboard the Zeus. I have taken an additional cabin for our luggage.”“And how long will we be gone?”“Some months. The rains do not begin until December.”He had spoken to her already about his excavations at Hissarlik. He had left them in the charge of his Russian assistant; but, from the first days of his courtship of Sophia, he had been eager to return. “You ask me why it has become my obsession,” he said to her one evening. “Why? Why is it considered to be the first city? Why is it the vision of the poets? Why has it haunted mankind for three thousand years? I do not know the answer to these things.”She realised soon enough that he did not enjoy being questioned, on that or any other subject; but, after a few glasses of wine, he would invariably furnish her with all the information she required. “Do you know the Cypriot proverb, Sophia,” he had asked her a week before the wedding, “‘Son of a priest, grandson of the devil’?” He chuckled. “My father was a Lutheran pastor.”“I have heard the saying.”“It is true! But he was not an ordinary minister. He told me of trolls and fairies. Of ghosts and demons. Of treasure buried in the bowels of the earth.”“Is that what you are digging up?”“No. I am digging for science, not for reward. And then, when I was about six years old, he began reading Homer to me. I did not understand the Greek, of course, but it was the music of the verse I loved. I became aware of the sound and the pattern. That is how I learned Arabic. And French, Greek, Russian, English, all of them came rolling off my tongue.”“You told me that your father had no education.”“And how did he become a minister? That is nonsense, my little Sophia. He educated himself in Greek.” She was silent for a moment. “That is why I promised him to study Homer. It was not difficult for me. It is pure. It is the origin.”***His letter to the Chrysanthis family had been wholly unexpected. He had requested from a friend in Athens, Stephanos the surgeon, photographs of young women of his acquaintance who might make suitable brides. “Please see if you can find me a young woman,” he wrote to Stephanos, “with a Greek name and a soul inspired by the history of her ancient land. I am a very good judge of faces, and my first impressions are never wrong.” Among the photographs Stephanos supplied was one of Sophia, the daughter of his friend the colonel, and Obermann wrote back at once. “Sophia Chrysanthis is a splendid woman, easy to talk to, compassionate, kindly and a good housewife, full of life and well brought up. I see in her eyes a great inclination for learning, and I am certain that she will love and respect me.” He also asked several questions. What property does Colonel Chrysanthis possess? How old is he and how many children does he have? How many male and how many female children? How old is Sophia? What is the colour of her hair? Does she play the piano? Does she speak foreign languages and, if so, which? Does she understand Homer and other ancient writers? The answers from Stephanos were entirely satisfactory: Sophia understood English and, more importantly, she read Homer with avidity. “I am overjoyed,” he wrote to his friend. “I have wished for such a companion all my life. We will be married within three months.” He immediately made plans to travel to Athens for his first meeting with his intended bride. In his letter to her parents, despatched from Constantinople, he enlarged upon her obvious propensity for learning. He described his excavations at Troy, and his previous excavations at Ithaca, “known to all the civilised world.” He also promised a dowry of fifteen thousand francs.The colonel and his wife did not take long to agree to his proposals, but they took the precaution of consulting Sophia. “It is an unusual courtship,” her mother told her, “but he means well.”“Am I to live abroad?”“He refers to Paris and London. He has houses in both cities.” She did not mention the current excavations; Anatolia had a reputation among the Greeks for lawlessness and barbarism. “He is an influential man, Sophia.”“Then I may learn to love him.”“You must try.” Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐A most interesting approach. A definite villian, an interesting heroine, and a surprising tale of what “might” have happened on the excavation of Troy.

⭐I’m a fan forever. Great read.

⭐I have read many biographies and nonfiction books by Mr. Ackroyd and was excited to try a novel. I am sorry to say I was not as enthralled as I hoped in this particular story. Sophia is a 16-year-old Greek girl who is wooed by the famous Herr Obermann to be his wife. Her family is delighted for her to go off with him to the archaeological site of Troy, which he recently uncovered.Mr. Obermann is a difficult man to like because he has set ideas and anything that proves to be different than his beliefs are destroyed or ignored. Another archaeologist arrives whose study takes him in a different direction from Obermann and Sophia is caught between the men.That is the basic plot of this book. My problems with this story are that it is hard to know what is based on facts and what is total fiction. I also had a hard time liking any of the characters although it was easy to like Sophia, especially at the end of the novel.If you enjoy archaeology and Troy especially, you will probably enjoy this novel. I just had a hard time getting through it.I borrowed this book from my local library.

⭐Heinrich Schliemann discovered Troy, that much I knew. I had always assumed him to be some dusty nineteenth-century German professor, treading in the footsteps of the illustrious Goethe. But no. As I now see from Wikipedia, he was a wealthy amateur, opportunist, and rogue. He was German born, yes, but worked mostly in Russia and America, where he became an American citizen; he was a polylinguist, speaking fourteen languages at the time of his death. He made his first million, possibly fraudulently, in the California Gold Rush, and multiplied it several times over by cornering parts of the armaments market in the Crimean War. He retired from business in his later forties and moved to Athens to pursue his passion: to rediscover the ancient sites described by Homer. Divorcing his Russian wife, he married a Greek girl thirty years his junior named Sophia Engastromenos. His excavations at the hill of Hissarlik, on the Turkish side of the Hellespont, revealed a history of ancient cities, built on top of one another over the course of several millennia. As skilled in self-promotion as he was lucky in archaeology, Schliemann made himself a world-famous figure, while further enhancing his private wealth with treasures smuggled from the site.Most of this finds its way into Ackroyd’s compact novel, at least as background. At first, only the surnames are changed: meet Heinrich Obermann and Sophia Chrysanthis, beautifully apt monikers for the megalomaniac archaeologist and his golden bride. It is an arranged marriage, but Sophia is swept away by the energy and enthusiasm of her husband, by the sheer scale of his excavations, and by his pagan conviction that they have been chosen by the gods to walk again in their ancient footsteps; there is a beautiful chapter in which they ride up the slopes of Mount Ida to visit the glade where Paris chose between the goddesses Hera, Athene, and Aphrodite. Heinrich, who knows much of Homer by memory, works largely by instinct, feeling the presence of ancient civilizations in the air around him and the ground under his feet, and apparently being mostly right. When visiting experts from Harvard or the British Museum raise some tentative questions about proof, Heinrich merely puts his hand to his heart, saying that he has all the proof he needs right there.As the novel proceeds, it becomes clear why Ackroyd has changed the names. He needs to develop the larger-than-life Heinrich in his own way, bringing events to conclusions that have no basis in history, but are nonetheless deeply rooted in character. Sophia proves remarkably competent in helping with the excavations, offering insights of her own, and serving as a charming mediator between her husband and those irritating visitors. But she also becomes aware that her husband is keeping secrets from her: not merely the valuable finds he conceals from their Turkish overseer, but also facts about his own history that she discovers only by accident. And when a young English paleontologist comes to the site to work on what appear to be tablets inscribed with writing, and his conclusions threaten to disprove everything that Heinrich had so fervently believed, events move to a climax that is both understated and devastating. Not for nothing is this novel called the Fall of Troy. It is hard not to weep for the loss to science that Heinrich’s bull-in-a-china-shop attitudes incur; similar charges were raised against Schliemann. Yet what we end with is the radiance of Heinrich’s vision, and of Homer’s epic blazing through him. Heinrich — whether Obermann or Schliemann — may have been a rogue, but he certainly was a glorious one.

⭐I have a life-long interest in archaeology and an abiding love for Homer and the Greek myths. So when I heard that Peter Ackroyd, a renowned and prolific British author, had published a novel–“The Fall of Troy”–about the excavation of Troy, I was intrigued.The more I investigated, the more curious I became. Ackroyd is an author who has published 30 books, as well as countless literary reviews, essays, and poems. His publications are surprisingly broad-based. They include novels, historical biographies, and major works of nonfiction. He is well-known in British literary circles not only for his own works, but also because he has held the position of chief book reviewer for “The Times” of London for more than twenty years. He has won the Whitbread Book Award for Biography, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, The Guardian Fiction Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, and one of his novels was shortlisted for the Booker Prize–in all, a stellar literary career.What intrigued me about “The Fall of Troy” was why Ackroyd chose to fictionalize the life of Heinrich Schliemann–the infamous 19th-century archaeologist who excavated the ruins of the ancient city of Troy and ruined much of the archaeological evidence in the process. Ackroyd is an accomplished novelist and a prize-winning historical biographer. He wrote a famous biography of Thomas More. Why, in this new book, did he add so much fiction to the story of Schliemann, that he could no longer even call his main character by his real name? Instead we get Heinrich Obermann…and instead of a whole life, we get a fragment of a few months hyped into a highly fictionalized swashbuckling melodrama.After reading the book it is clear: Ackroyd wanted to satirize Heinrich Schliemann and fiction is, of course, the tool that does this best. “The Fall of Troy” is a brilliant satire! Schliemann, in the guise of Heinrich Obermann, comes off as a larger-than-life, grandiose, dangerously manipulating, self-promoting buffoon…and I loved it from the very first page!The character of Obermann is completely over-the-top. But there is just enough authenticity to the man so that readers get the feeling they are truly in the presence of the “real” Schliemann…and what a horrible, self-deluding racist and egotist he was! Don’t read this book for the plot; read it for the unforgettable characterization of Schliemann. Overlook the plot if you have to–it only deserves two stars–at best, it is trite, predictable, and melodramatic. There were times I felt like I was reading the script for an engaging but awful blockbuster Hollywood movie.If you read this book, do so primarily for the chance to meet–in literary flesh, so-to-speak–the man and the personality that was Heinrich Schliemann. And then if you want to have even more fun, let this character stand in for any number of other highly placed, self-deluding buffoons that populate our contemporary world, particularly in the political arena. That should get even more smiles out of you.This is a clever and delightful book, an unexpected excellent satire. Enjoy!

⭐For the first two thirds of the book I found this really quite slow and a bit of a struggle to stick with (the only reason I was able to keep going was the fact that it was only a couple of hundred pages long and I felt that I would be giving up too easily if I couldn’t finish a book that short). The last third of the book was quite a bit better and more interesting. I intend to read more of Peter Ackroyd’s books so I hope that this book is not a sign of things to come or the best of them all.

⭐This short novel is a strange uneven amalgam of romance, history and latter-day Greek tragedy. Much of its content is built on Heinrich Schliemann’s search for Priam’s Troy & his marriage to Sophie Engastromenos, i.e. the novel’s heroine is named Sophia Chrysanthis. The writer mirrors Schliemann’s biography closely, but strands of myth and magic are woven in as the tale moves to its inevitable end. It’s possible to look for sub-meanings e.g., ‘sophos’ translates as ‘wisdom’, but ancient Troy has a hold over this Sophia ‘like an accident in a life that changes everything’ (p.93). The parallels with the legend are obvious, as in Chapter Nine, where Ackroyd’s protagonist, Heinrich Obermann, makes an expedition to Mt. Ida to ape the Judgement of Paris which sparked the Trojan War.’The Fall of Troy’ is not a novel I can say I actually liked as such, but it does remain in the mind after the final page. It’s a study of deception and obsession, of myth and memory, & how, despite reason, men WILL persist in weaving their own destructive fates – a combination which leads Sophia to experience the random tragic effects & casual cruelties of the old Greek gods.

⭐This novel is based on the lives of the German excavator of Troy, Heinrich Schliemann (here called Heinrich Obermann) and his Greek second wife and fellow archaeologist Sophia Engastromenos (here called Sophia Chrysanthis). Both are deeply devoted to the Iliad and to Troy, but Obermann prides himself not only on his scientific skills but also on his intuition and imagination which make him identify physical features (beautifully described) with the very spots which Homer’s gods and heroes had trodden. He is superstitious and even believes, when they experience an earthquake, that it was Zeus speaking. So vivid is his imagination that he takes liberties – to put it mildly – with archaeological evidence when it does not fit his theories (as the real Schliemann did also). In this novel he is a most unattractive character: loud, uncouth, unashamedly boastful of his genius, peremptory and controlling, and intolerantly dogmatic whenever his conclusions are challenged by other archaeologists – as they are in this novel by two successive visitors to his excavations. Sophia is more ready to listen to them, and she has already caught her husband out in telling downright lies – and she will discover more of what he is capable of. And then Ackroyd’s own imagination, which for much of the book has been tethered to aspects of the real Schliemann’s life, takes off to a purely invented ending that is, however, aptly in tune with the kind of myths in which Obermann had so passionately believed.A tale well told.

⭐SAFE READING – NO SPOILERSHerr Obermann, a German archaeologist who wants to discover the Troy of Homer is a thinly disguised story about Heinrich Schliemann (1822 – 1890) a German amateur archaeologist and an advocate of the historical reality of places mentioned in the works of Homer.They both experience the highs and lows of their precarious profession. Ackroyd tells a very enjoyable, interesting story set in a magical and legendary setting. Anyone who has “searched for Troy” as I have, will, I am sure enjoy this book.One of Ackroyd’s best.

⭐The Fall of Troy is an enjoyable read, making good use of Ackroyd’s familiar themes of archaeology, esoteric culture, the darkness at the heart of the city, the question of inheritance and the danger of preconception. Being the first novel since First Light to be set fully outside London, the reader would expect that there is no connection to the city, but isn’t London the New Troy, thanks to Brutus? The Plato Papers warned Londoners against losing sight of their heritage, and in many ways this novel can be said to do the same thing. Obermann is trying to realise a myth – perhaps in the same way as Iain Sinclair sees London in a mythical way rather than in Ackroyd’s visionary way. Consequently, like Plato’s fellow Londoners after his return from Mouldwarp London, Obermann refuses to acknowledge the truth of the evidence. Moreover, the rebuildings of Troy create the layers of history which are so much a feature of London. The Fall of Troy is thus 100% Ackroyd and, as such, perhaps not for all tastes. Ackroyd does after all require a reader sympathetic to his visionary style, and not everyone is up for that.

⭐I needed the book for my book club. The copy was perfect and the story was fine. It was good value.

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