To The Last Page

As an English historian, a biographer, a television presenter and a novelist who has also successfully managed to adapt to a range of styles including period pastiche, it can be hard to know when we’re getting the real Peter Ackroyd in his fiction writing. It’s of course by no means essential for a writer’s own voice to be identified with the content of his work, but in the case of Mr Cadmus the tone is so uneven, falling somewhere between comedic and sinister, that you are left not quite knowing what to make of it, but feeling that whatever its objective might have been it hasn’t been entirely successful. Mr Cadmus starts out like a comedy of smalltown English manners, introducing us to Maud Finch and Millicent Swallow, two single middle-aged ladies who occupy the outer edges of a row of the three cottages in The Coppice in the village of Little Camborne. The middle house between them has been vacant since the death of the previous owner who they didn’t really approve of, but there ...