Review by New York Times Review
THOUGH many of us (Peter Ackroyd included) greatly would prefer common readers to learn just enough Middle English to begin enjoying Chaucer's poetry in the original, that evades the way things are and the way they are going to be. Retelling Chaucer in our contemporary prose necessarily is a great loss, yet so rich is Chaucer that enormous value remains in Ackroyd's robust versions of "The Canterbury Tales." Geoffrey Chaucer (1343?-1400) by general and accurate consent is second only to Shakespeare among all writers in what is now our language. Shakespeare's uncanniest power, to create the illusion of human lives, owes much to the creator of the Wife of Bath, the Pardoner and their fellow pilgrims to Canterbury. Born to a prosperous London family of wine merchants, Chaucer served three English kings as diplomat, customs controller and supervisor of royal residences. As a poet, he had royal patronage and depended upon Italian precursors, at first mediated for him by French translations, and later absorbed directly. Petrarch and Dante he acknowledged, frequently with irony, but he never once mentioned his older contemporary, Boccaccio, the over-whelming influence upon him. Without Boccaccio, no "Canterbury Tales": that would be a fair judgment, though Chaucer is highly original in closely integrating his tales and their tellers, unlike Boccaccio. Chaucer's England was violent: usurpations, civil war and rape were prevalent. He himself had to make a legal settlement for a rape he evidently committed, and he suffered the experience of seeing friends and associates, with whom he had served Richard II, beheaded while he was spared. As a poet, he clearly had a sense of his magnitude, though his pervasive irony masks it. French was still the language of the court, and Chaucer had chosen to write Ln the English vernacular. Much of his work is magnificent translation, and I think he would approve, however ironically, Ackroyd's Chaucerian translation. ACKROYD is a fiercely prolific novelist, biographer, general person of letters, sometimes reminding me of the equally industrious and similarly brilliant Anthony Burgess, whom I continue to miss personally. Burgess, though, was at his best in some of his novels, particularly in his Joycean fiction about Shakespeare, "Nothing Like the Sun." Ackroyd's novels hold me, particularly his outrageous "Milton in America," but his best work is in his marvelous cultural visions: "Albion," "London," "Thames." I say "visions" because they convey a comprehensive and frequently dark sense of the English character and its vagaries, including sudden excursions into brutality and lawlessness. That darkly ironic sense is profoundly Chaucerian and suits the poet's major work, the unfinished yet aesthetically complete "Canterbury Tales," upon which he continued to work until his death at around 57. He contrasts in this with Shakespeare, who died at 52 and chose to write nothing during his three final years, while retired at Stratford-on-Avon. Shakespeare's greatest contemporary, the epic poet Edmund Spenser, derived directly from Chaucer, whom he praised as the "well of English undefiled." That prompted the 18th-century poet-critic John Dryden to term Chaucer "a perpetual fountain of good sense." Ackroyd's Chaucer is a personified London and a humanized Thames, incessantly vital and comprehending everything it flows past. Like Shakespeare's plays, "The Canterbury Tales" convey a strong impression of the author's detachment from his own creation. Chaucer the Pilgrim, a character in the "Tales," is partly a parody of Dante the Pilgrim in the "Commedia" and partly an anticipation of Jonathan Swift's Lemuel Gulliver and the Tale-Teller in "A Tale of a Tub." As pilgrim, Chaucer professes admiration for every scoundrel he gathers together in his company of 28 wayfarers en route to Canterbury. Ackroyd catches the mode in which the pilgrimage is the 14th-century version of our West Indian cruises, erotic and recreational "wanderings by the way." The two grandest of Chaucer's characters are Alice, the Wife of Bath, exuberantly erotic vitalist, and the Pardoner, perhaps a eunuch, a charlatan selling spurious religious relics and indulgences for sin. Chaucer's gusto in imagining them is answered by Ackroyd's own relish for the positive drive of the Wife of Bath and the negative intensity of the Pardoner. Ackroyd is happiest and in his best form with Chaucer's sublime ribaldry: the tales told by the Miller, the Reeve and the Summoner. Yet his own Catholic nostalgia lingers in a conviction that "The Canterbury Tales" "moves between piety and farce." The farce is stronger than the faith in this secular masterpiece, which helped encourage Shakespeare to his own freedom from the sacred. Dante made Chaucer uncomfortable: I think the poet of the "The Canterbury Tales" would have rejoiced in Shakespeare. Harold Bloom's forthcoming books are "Living Labyrinth: Literature and Influence" and "Till I End My Song: A Gathering of Last Poems." He teaches at Yale.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 14, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Who better than Ackroyd to retell the tales of Chaucer's iconic pilgrims? A protean, creative, and prolific writer, historian, and critic, Ackroyd possesses an erudition that is matched by enthusiasm for his mission, that of bringing history to life for all to enjoy. It makes perfect sense that Ackroyd would relate to worldly-wise Chaucer so deeply, as evident in his superb Chaucer biography and in the novel The Clerkenwell Tales (2004), a takeoff on Chaucer's masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales. Now Ackroyd releases that indelible long poem from its confounding medieval English, replete with odd spellings and lost definitions real, for instance, meant royal and translates it into supple and poetic contemporary prose, a transformation Chaucer, himself a great believer in the vernacular, might well applaud. Cleverly illustrated by Nick Bantock, of Griffin and Sabine fame, Ackroyd's fresh and transporting retelling brings forward Chaucer's salacious wit and scabrous humor, shrewd observations, and lustrous descriptions as well as the inimitable voices of the pilgrims, from the Knight to the Wife of Bath. This is, as Chaucer promised, a feast of words, and Ackroyd 's translation, like Seamus Heaney's of Beowulf (2000) and W. S. Merwin's of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2002), will become the much appreciated standard.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2009 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Ackroyd's retelling of Chaucer's classic isn't exactly like the Ethan Hawke'd film version of Hamlet, but it's not altogether different, either. Noting in his introduction that the source material "is as close to a contemporary novel as Wells Cathedral is to an apartment block," Ackroyd translates the original verse into clean and enjoyable prose that clears up the roadblocks readers could face in tackling the classic. "The Knight's Tale," the first of 24 stories, sets the pace by removing distracting tics but keeping those that are characteristic, if occasionally cringe-inducing, like the narrator's insistence on lines like, "Well. Enough of this rambling." The rest of the stories continue in kind, with shorter stories benefiting most from Ackroyd's treatment, though the longer entries tend to... ramble. The tales are a serious undertaking in any translation, and here, through no fault of Ackroyd's work, what is mostly apparent is the absence of the original text, making finishing this an accomplishment that seems diminished, even if the stories themselves prove more readable. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Novelist and biographer Ackroyd (London: The Biography) offers a modern English prose "retelling" of The Canterbury Tales designed "to facilitate the experience of the poem." After an informative overview of Chaucer's life and the elements that "conspired to render Chaucer the most representative, as well as the most authoritative, poet of his time," he begins with the general prolog to the Tales and concludes with Chaucer's retractions. The body of the work is made up of 23 tales, starting with The Knight's Tale and ending with The Parson's Prologue. Verdict Ackroyd's prose is not elegant: the sentences are generally short, with few transitional phrases to link these sentences to form a unified composition. Some of the language does not accurately reflect the flavor of Chaucer's original words. Fans of Ackroyd's previous works may appreciate this effort; other readers may prefer the classic modern English verse translation of Geoffrey Chaucer's great poem by Nevill Coghill.-Kathryn R. Bartelt, Univ. of Evansville Libs., IN (c) Copyright 2010. 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
Continuing his apparent mission to refract the whole of English culture and history through his personal lens, Ackroyd (Thames: The Biography, 2008, etc.) offers an all-prose rendering of Chaucer's mixed-media masterpiece. While Burton Raffel's modern English version of The Canterbury Tales (2008) was unabridged, Ackroyd omits both "The Tale of Melibee" and "The Parson's Tale" on the undoubtedly correct assumption that these "standard narratives of pious exposition" hold little interest for contemporary readers. Dialing down the piety, the author dials up the raunch, freely tossing about the F-bomb and Anglo-Saxon words for various body parts that Chaucer prudently described in Latin. Since "The Wife of Bath's Tale" and "The Miller's Tale," for example, are both decidedly earthy in Middle English, the interpolated obscenities seem unnecessary as well as jarringly anachronistic. And it's anyone's guess why Ackroyd feels obliged redundantly to include the original titles ("Here bigynneth the Squieres Tales," etc.) directly underneath the new ones ("The Squires Tale," etc.); these one-line blasts of antique spelling and diction remind us what we're missing without adding anything in the way of comprehension. The author's other peculiar choice is to occasionally interject first-person comments by the narrator where none exist in the original, such as, "He asked me about myself thenwhere I had come from, where I had beenbut I quickly turned the conversation to another course." There seems to be no reason for these arbitrary elaborations, which muffle the impact of those rare times in the original when Chaucer directly addresses the reader. Such quibbles would perhaps be unfair if Ackroyd were retelling some obscure gem of Old English, but they loom larger with Chaucer because there are many modern versions of The Canterbury Tales. Raffel's rendering captured a lot more of the poetry, while doing as good a job as Ackroyd with the vigorous prose. A not-very-illuminating updating of Chaucer's Tales. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
