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First Light
First Light begins with an ominous coincidence: the reappearance of the ancient night sky during the excavation of an astronomically aligned Neolithic grave in Dorset. Add to this a group of wonderful eccentrics—archaeologists, astronomers, a civil servant, a stand-up comic, local rustics—who converge on the site to disturb the quiet seclusion of Pilgrin Valley.
Someone (or something) is trying to sabotage the best efforts of the excavators, headed by Mark Clare, to unearth the dormant secrets of the burial ground. Meanwhile, at the nearby observatory, astronomer Damien Fall, his telescope focused on the red star Aldebaran, is unnerved by the deeper significance he imputes to the celestial sophistication of the region’s ancient inhabitants. And Joey Hanover, a retired music-hall and TV entertainer searching for his own past, has learned secrets from Farmer Mint and his son, Boy, the weirdly cryptic guardians of their ancestral home in the valley. What do all these, among others, have in common?
All is masterfully woven into an immensely engaging and entertaining novel—a suspenseful reflection on life, nature, and the cosmos, and above all an illuminating and enchanting story.
Someone (or something) is trying to sabotage the best efforts of the excavators, headed by Mark Clare, to unearth the dormant secrets of the burial ground. Meanwhile, at the nearby observatory, astronomer Damien Fall, his telescope focused on the red star Aldebaran, is unnerved by the deeper significance he imputes to the celestial sophistication of the region’s ancient inhabitants. And Joey Hanover, a retired music-hall and TV entertainer searching for his own past, has learned secrets from Farmer Mint and his son, Boy, the weirdly cryptic guardians of their ancestral home in the valley. What do all these, among others, have in common?
All is masterfully woven into an immensely engaging and entertaining novel—a suspenseful reflection on life, nature, and the cosmos, and above all an illuminating and enchanting story.
336 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1989
8 people are currently reading
396 people want to read
About the author
Peter Ackroyd
185 books1,500 followersPeter Ackroyd CBE is an English novelist and biographer with a particular interest in the history and culture of London.
Peter Ackroyd's mother worked in the personnel department of an engineering firm, his father having left the family home when Ackroyd was a baby. He was reading newspapers by the age of 5 and, at 9, wrote a play about Guy Fawkes. Reputedly, he first realized he was gay at the age of 7.
Ackroyd was educated at St. Benedict's, Ealing and at Clare College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with a double first in English. In 1972, he was a Mellon Fellow at Yale University in the United States. The result of this fellowship was Ackroyd's Notes for a New Culture, written when he was only 22 and eventually published in 1976. The title, a playful echo of T. S. Eliot's Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), was an early indication of Ackroyd's penchant for creatively exploring and reexamining the works of other London-based writers.
Ackroyd's literary career began with poetry, including such works as London Lickpenny (1973) and The Diversions of Purley (1987). He later moved into fiction and has become an acclaimed author, winning the 1998 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the biography Thomas More and being shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1987.
Ackroyd worked at The Spectator magazine between 1973 and 1977 and became joint managing editor in 1978. In 1982 he published The Great Fire of London, his first novel. This novel deals with one of Ackroyd's great heroes, Charles Dickens, and is a reworking of Little Dorrit. The novel set the stage for the long sequence of novels Ackroyd has produced since, all of which deal in some way with the complex interaction of time and space, and what Ackroyd calls "the spirit of place". It is also the first in a sequence of novels of London, through which he traces the changing, but curiously consistent nature of the city. Often this theme is explored through the city's artists, and especially its writers.
Ackroyd has always shown a great interest in the city of London, and one of his best known works, London: The Biography, is an extensive and thorough discussion of London through the ages.
His fascination with London literary and artistic figures is also displayed in the sequence of biographies he has produced of Ezra Pound (1980), T. S. Eliot (1984), Charles Dickens (1990), William Blake (1995), Thomas More (1998), Chaucer (2004), William Shakespeare (2005), and J. M. W. Turner. The city itself stands astride all these works, as it does in the fiction.
From 2003 to 2005, Ackroyd wrote a six-book non-fiction series (Voyages Through Time), intended for readers as young as eight. This was his first work for children. The critically acclaimed series is an extensive narrative of key periods in world history.
Early in his career, Ackroyd was nominated a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984 and, as well as producing fiction, biography and other literary works, is also a regular radio and television broadcaster and book critic.
In the New Year's honours list of 2003, Ackroyd was awarded the CBE.
Peter Ackroyd's mother worked in the personnel department of an engineering firm, his father having left the family home when Ackroyd was a baby. He was reading newspapers by the age of 5 and, at 9, wrote a play about Guy Fawkes. Reputedly, he first realized he was gay at the age of 7.
Ackroyd was educated at St. Benedict's, Ealing and at Clare College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with a double first in English. In 1972, he was a Mellon Fellow at Yale University in the United States. The result of this fellowship was Ackroyd's Notes for a New Culture, written when he was only 22 and eventually published in 1976. The title, a playful echo of T. S. Eliot's Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), was an early indication of Ackroyd's penchant for creatively exploring and reexamining the works of other London-based writers.
Ackroyd's literary career began with poetry, including such works as London Lickpenny (1973) and The Diversions of Purley (1987). He later moved into fiction and has become an acclaimed author, winning the 1998 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the biography Thomas More and being shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1987.
Ackroyd worked at The Spectator magazine between 1973 and 1977 and became joint managing editor in 1978. In 1982 he published The Great Fire of London, his first novel. This novel deals with one of Ackroyd's great heroes, Charles Dickens, and is a reworking of Little Dorrit. The novel set the stage for the long sequence of novels Ackroyd has produced since, all of which deal in some way with the complex interaction of time and space, and what Ackroyd calls "the spirit of place". It is also the first in a sequence of novels of London, through which he traces the changing, but curiously consistent nature of the city. Often this theme is explored through the city's artists, and especially its writers.
Ackroyd has always shown a great interest in the city of London, and one of his best known works, London: The Biography, is an extensive and thorough discussion of London through the ages.
His fascination with London literary and artistic figures is also displayed in the sequence of biographies he has produced of Ezra Pound (1980), T. S. Eliot (1984), Charles Dickens (1990), William Blake (1995), Thomas More (1998), Chaucer (2004), William Shakespeare (2005), and J. M. W. Turner. The city itself stands astride all these works, as it does in the fiction.
From 2003 to 2005, Ackroyd wrote a six-book non-fiction series (Voyages Through Time), intended for readers as young as eight. This was his first work for children. The critically acclaimed series is an extensive narrative of key periods in world history.
Early in his career, Ackroyd was nominated a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984 and, as well as producing fiction, biography and other literary works, is also a regular radio and television broadcaster and book critic.
In the New Year's honours list of 2003, Ackroyd was awarded the CBE.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 36 reviews
May 29, 2017
Peter Ackroyd has a thing about the past coming back to haunt the present. That sounds like a pretty straightforward theme, and is the basis of so many novels. Ackroyd takes this idea and turns it into such a transformative (and often disturbing) experience that the result is very different from the one I had initially imagined.
I’m not sure what I expected when I first picked this up. Perhaps I was thinking of the darkness of Hawksmoor, except transplanted to the English countryside. But from the very start of the novel, this was something different: the musings of an aged astronomer form the opening, musings that extol the wonder of the bigness of the universe, the incredible largeness of it all... described in such a way that make the reader and the world they live in feel very small, very minor. After that strange and unsettling opening, the reader is shown the life of various amusing and quirky – for lack of a better phrase – “English types”. There are bumbling archeologists. Hilariously pretentious bureaucrats. Dramatic theatre types. A horny Scottish lad and his flirty assistant. Odd, close-lipped, slightly sinister farmers (Farmer & Boy Mint, my favorite characters). And malicious country village queens who would be at home in the world of Mapp & Lucia. All the characters come together, in one fashion or another, around the dig of an increasingly sinister archaeological find in the countryside. The story consists of many small and varied chapters: pithy comedies of manners, obliquely off-kilter episodes full of ambiguity, and sometimes barbed, sometimes wistful domestic vignettes.
Yet underneath many of these characters and scenes, there is melancholy and fear, slowly churning away. For all of the funny one-liners and deadpan character bits, this is a novel with tragic death, disturbing dementia, and a longing for oblivion at its core. It is both adorable and chilling, in equal parts. The mysteries of life and where it all comes from, where it all is going, remain unsolved, of course. The mysteries of why we do the things we do and to what end are also left for the reader to contemplate. This is a novel full of much wit, but the overall feeling I was left with was one of almost transcendent yearning, as felt by the characters, and as felt a bit by me when realizing that this yearning is, as always, destined to remained unfulfilled. Such is life!
I’m not sure what I expected when I first picked this up. Perhaps I was thinking of the darkness of Hawksmoor, except transplanted to the English countryside. But from the very start of the novel, this was something different: the musings of an aged astronomer form the opening, musings that extol the wonder of the bigness of the universe, the incredible largeness of it all... described in such a way that make the reader and the world they live in feel very small, very minor. After that strange and unsettling opening, the reader is shown the life of various amusing and quirky – for lack of a better phrase – “English types”. There are bumbling archeologists. Hilariously pretentious bureaucrats. Dramatic theatre types. A horny Scottish lad and his flirty assistant. Odd, close-lipped, slightly sinister farmers (Farmer & Boy Mint, my favorite characters). And malicious country village queens who would be at home in the world of Mapp & Lucia. All the characters come together, in one fashion or another, around the dig of an increasingly sinister archaeological find in the countryside. The story consists of many small and varied chapters: pithy comedies of manners, obliquely off-kilter episodes full of ambiguity, and sometimes barbed, sometimes wistful domestic vignettes.
Yet underneath many of these characters and scenes, there is melancholy and fear, slowly churning away. For all of the funny one-liners and deadpan character bits, this is a novel with tragic death, disturbing dementia, and a longing for oblivion at its core. It is both adorable and chilling, in equal parts. The mysteries of life and where it all comes from, where it all is going, remain unsolved, of course. The mysteries of why we do the things we do and to what end are also left for the reader to contemplate. This is a novel full of much wit, but the overall feeling I was left with was one of almost transcendent yearning, as felt by the characters, and as felt a bit by me when realizing that this yearning is, as always, destined to remained unfulfilled. Such is life!
November 26, 2021
Uzun zamandır bu kadar kötü yazılmış bir kitap okumamıştım. Aslında hikayenin ana malzemesi -çağrısı- son derece ilginç ve umut vadediyordu. İlk bölümünden çok iyi bir sezon izleyeceğim hissini yaratan dizileri anımsattı. Fakat roman fena patladı:) Karakterler o kadar eksik ve yapaydı ki bir süre sonra sadece olay örgüsünü takip etmeye başladım. Diğer bütün ayrıntılar ilginçliğini kaybetti. Diğer yandan yazarın yer altından galaksiler ötesine kurguladığı izleğin romantikliği bir yerden sonra inanılmaz sıkıcı hale geldi. İlk yarısında romanı Göbeklitepe projeksiyonunda okuyarak, acayip bir özdeşleşmeyle eşlik etmiştim; ikinci yarısında ondan sıyrılmam da okuma keyfimi ciddi ölçüde baltaladı. Daha önce bir Peter Ackroyd kitabı okumamıştım, bu son olur muhtemelen. Tavsiyeci olmayacağım:) İyi okumalar.
January 11, 2026
"Why is it that we think of a circular motion as the most perfect? Is it because it has no beginning and no end?"
First Light (1989) by Peter Ackroyd
1. Characters and Interrelations
* Mark Clare: The lead archaeologist excavating the tumulus in Pilgrin Valley. He is enthusiastic, romantic about the past, and deeply devoted to his wife, Kathleen.
* Kathleen Clare: Mark’s wife. She suffers from a disability (a withered leg) and deep depression. She feels a profound, almost mystical connection to the sadness of the earth and the past.
* Damian Fall: An astronomer at the Holblack Moor Observatory. He is neurotic, fearful of his own mind, and senses a "tremor of uncertainty" in the universe. He lives in Mauve Cottage.
* Evangeline Tupper: A senior civil servant from the Department of the Environment. She is camp, domineering, and cynical, often accompanied by her "assistant" Hermione.
* Hermione Crisp (“Baby Doll”): Evangeline’s loyal, masculine-dressing companion and assistant.
* Joey Hanover: A retired stand-up comedian ("Joey Chuckles"). He is an orphan searching for his birth parents and origins in Dorset. He is eventually revealed to be related to the Mint family.
* Floey Hanover: Joey’s supportive, sharp-tongued wife, a former chorus girl.
* Farmer Mint & Boy Mint: Father and son farmers who own the land around the valley. They are eccentric, seemingly "primitive" guardians of the valley's secrets, representing an ancient, continuous lineage.
* The Archaeological Team:
* Martha Temple: Finds supervisor; outwardly sweet but often manipulates situations to stir trouble.
* Owen Chard: Site surveyor; grumpy, pragmatic, and skeptical.
* Julian Hill: Environmentalist; ambitious and prone to elaborate, mystical theories.
* Augustine Fraicheur: An antique dealer in Lyme Regis who gossips with Evangeline and rents the flat above his shop to the Clares.
* Alec: Damian Fall’s cheerful, competent assistant at the observatory.
2. Plot Summary (Chapter by Chapter)
* Ch 1: The Uncertainty Principle: Astronomer Damian Fall observes the star Aldebaran at Holblack Moor, contemplating the "uncertainty" and chaos of the universe.
* Ch 2: After the Fire: Mark Clare shows Evangeline Tupper the tumulus in Pilgrin Valley, revealed by a forest fire.
* Ch 3: On the Mound: Mark and Evangeline inspect the site; Evangeline feels a strange ancient presence; Mark is enthusiastic about the dig.
* Ch 4: The Valley: Mark drives Evangeline to the station and returns to the valley, sensing a figure in the window of a nearby cottage (Damian’s).
* Ch 5: Some Inhabitants: Mark meets Farmer Mint and Boy Mint, who mockingly predict he will find only "sheep's bones and rabbit's teeth."
* Ch 6: London Lilac: Evangeline visits her elderly father in London, revealing her emotional detachment.
* Ch 7: Waiting: Mark returns home to Lyme Regis to his disabled wife, Kathleen, who is reading about ancient astronomers.
* Ch 8: Earlier Time: A reflection on Kathleen’s childhood, her disability, and her fear of abandonment.
* Ch 9: A Child: Mark and Kathleen discuss their hopes to adopt a child; Mark connects the stars to human faces.
* Ch 10: At the Site: The excavation begins. The team (Owen, Martha, Julian) is introduced. Local children tease them about waking "the old one."
* Ch 11: Field Walking: The team surveys the fields. Martha thinks she sees a figure at the cottage window.
* Ch 12: An Argument: Julian Hill argues that the site is an astronomical observatory; Mark tells a story about flying men in Peru.
* Ch 13-14: A Vision / The Vision Fades: Mark recounts the Peru story to the team and later to Kathleen; Kathleen reveals her inability to escape into stories/worlds like Mark can.
* Ch 15: The Excavation: Evangeline visits the dig again. An ox-bone shovel is discovered, then mysteriously stolen.
* Ch 16: Visitors: Mark and Evangeline visit the Mints’ farm. Evangeline is baffled by their eccentric behavior and "ancient" aura.
* Ch 17-19: The Hanovers: Joey and Floey Hanover are introduced on the beach. Joey is searching for his past. He helps Kathleen after she falls near the Cobb.
* Ch 20: In the Twilight: Kathleen receives a letter delaying their adoption application due to her disability; she sinks into despair.
* Ch 21-22: Invaders: Work continues. The site is vandalized overnight, but only the ox-bone shovel is taken.
* Ch 23-24: Two Ladies: Evangeline and Hermione arrive in Dorset to investigate the vandalism.
* Ch 25-26: The Cottage/Conversation: Mark and Evangeline visit Damian Fall at Mauve Cottage. They see star maps on his walls; Mark realizes the link between archaeology and astronomy.
* Ch 30-34: Progress & Decline: Excavation deepens. Mark and Kathleen’s relationship strains under her depression. Damian Fall struggles with mental instability while observing the red giant star Aldebaran.
* Ch 35: The Entrance: A "blind entrance" to the tomb is found, blocked by a stone slab covered in indecipherable markings.
* Ch 36: Decoding: Mark realizes the markings on the stone are a map of the constellations.
* Ch 37: Guardian Angels: Joey Hanover recognizes Damian’s cottage from his childhood memories.
* Ch 54-55: Cults: New Age travellers and a cult called "Corona" camp in the valley. Evangeline tries to disperse them with a speech but falls off a human pyramid.
* Ch 56-58: Social Maneuvers: The Hanovers settle in; Augustine Fraicheur gossips with Evangeline about the "Mint dinner" (a yearly gathering of the Mint clan).
* Ch 65: Connections: Mark visits the observatory; Alec explains that humans are made of "star stuff," giving Mark a sense of connection between the dead and the living.
* Ch 66: Letters: Mark and Martha enter a newly discovered underground souterrain (tunnel). Mark finds dates scrawled on the roof (e.g., 1586), implying the tomb has been secretly visited for centuries.
* Ch 67-69: The Mint Dinner: Evangeline confronts the Mints about the tunnel. The Mint family holds their annual reunion; Joey Hanover attends, gets drunk, and is told the "truth" about his family and the tomb.
* Ch 70: At the Centre: The archaeologists break through to the central chamber. Mark crawls into a small side tunnel and is struck on the head.
* Ch 76: Think Pink: (Flash forward) Kathleen has committed suicide. Her coffin goes missing before the funeral.
* Ch 77-78: At Last: Mark tracks the coffin to the Hanovers' shed. The Mints arrive to claim "The Old One" (their ancestor in the tomb). Joey opens the ancient coffin and finds a preserved body that begins to "transmit" voices/history.
3. Location: Sense of Time and Place
* Location: The setting oscillates between the subterranean/earthy (Pilgrin Valley, the damp tumulus, the Mints' cluttered farmhouse) and the celestial/scientific (Holblack Moor Observatory, the white dome, computer screens).
* Sense of Place: Dorset is depicted as a "haunted place" with a "human presence," where the landscape itself (chalk, fossils, tumuli) acts as a memory bank. It is earthy, damp, and ancient (The Mints' farm smells of "moth balls and old eau de cologne" or worse; the tomb smells of "old earth").
* Sense of Time:
* Deep Time vs. Present: The novel collapses the distance between the Neolithic period and the present. The stars observed by Damian are light from the past; the fossils Kathleen holds are ancient life; the Mints represent an unbroken lineage that makes 5,000 years seem like yesterday.
* Cyclical Time: The narrative suggests time is not linear. Mark realizes "Nothing is destroyed... everything returns." The dates scrawled in the tomb (1586, 1894) show that the past has never really been "lost," just hidden.
* Scientific vs. Mythic Time: The astronomers measure light-years (scientific), while the Mints and Joey experience time as memory and ancestry (mythic/emotional).
4. List of Oppositions
* Earth / Sky: (The archaeologists digging down vs. the astronomers looking up; the "fogou" underground vs. the "darkened house" of the observatory).
* Light / Darkness: (The strobe lights/torches of the dig vs. the pitch black of the tomb; the "creatures of light" vs. the "darkness" Damian fears).
* Continuity / Interruption: (The Mints' unbroken family line/custodianship vs. the Archaeologists' intrusion/disruption).
* Comedy / Tragedy: (Joey Hanover’s music-hall humor and songs vs. Kathleen Clare’s suicidal depression).
* Revelation / Concealment: (The scientific urge to expose/excavate vs. the Mints' urge to bury/hide/protect).
* Gravity / Flight: (The heavy stones/earth pressing down vs. the myth of the flying men/children turned to stone).
* Ancestry / Adoption: (Joey finding his blood lineage vs. Mark and Kathleen’s failed attempt to adopt a child).
* Preservation / Decay: (The museum holograms Julian dreams of vs. the rotting, damp reality of the actual tomb).
5. Premonitory Glimpses (Quotes)
* "It was twelve feet at its highest point... This long narrow mound might have marked the sudden emergence of some creature now extinct or have represented some ancient and forgotten disease in the landscape."
* "She turned around quickly and peered into the clusters of beech and ash above the valley; and for a moment she thought she saw something moving between the trees."
* "He drove past the house... But he did not notice that the old couple were standing outside the Mints' farmhouse... The house had not changed at all. It might have stood like this for centuries."
* "I feel so many things... but I don't—" (Mark, cut off by Evangeline asking about murders).
* "I saw something. Then I looked down. And then someone pushed me." (Martha Temple after falling).
* "There is something wrong in the valley. Something evil in the tomb. Don't you feel it?" (The traveller in the purple shirt).
* "Everything has to end... All we’re doing is waiting for the end." (Kathleen).
* "It was as if he had confronted some living thing, trapped in the tomb but now rushing towards him."
6. Study Questions
* Astronomy vs. Archaeology: How do the Observatory and the Tumulus function as mirrors of each other in the novel? Consider the concepts of "looking up" (space) and "looking down" (time).
* The Role of the Mints: How does the Mint family challenge the traditional authority of science and history? Discuss their role as "guardians" of the valley.
* Time as a Cycle: Mark Clare concludes that "nothing really dies" and "everything returns." How does the plot structure (e.g., the discovery of the recent dates in the ancient tomb) support this theme of cyclical time?
* Comedy and Tragedy: How does the comic subplot of Joey Hanover and Evangeline Tupper contrast with the tragic arc of Kathleen Clare? Do these tones merge by the end?
* Scientific vs. Intuitive Knowledge: Contrast the way Julian Hill and Owen Chard understand the site (data, theories) with how Kathleen and Joey Hanover understand it (intuition, memory, emotion). Which does the novel suggest is more "true"?
* The Significance of "The Old One": What does the body in the coffin represent to the different characters (a scientific find for the archaeologists vs. an ancestor for the Mints)?
* Kathleen’s Disability and Connection: How does Kathleen’s physical disability serve as a metaphor for her connection to the "broken" or "ancient" aspects of the landscape?
* The Symbolism of Light: Analyze the title First Light. How does light function as a symbol in the contexts of the stars, the fire that revealed the tomb, and the "light" inside the characters?
* Satire of Bureaucracy: How does Ackroyd use the character of Evangeline Tupper to satirize modern bureaucratic attitudes toward heritage and the environment?
* The Unknowable Past: The archaeologists find artifacts from vastly different eras mixed together. What is the novel suggesting about the reliability of historical dating and the linear narrative of history?
Something Vengeful and Ancient September 17, 1989
Something Vengeful and Ancient By JOHN CROWLEY
FIRST LIGHT By Peter Ackroyd.
Peter Ackroyd is the author of several innovative fictions as interesting for the forms he fashions for them as for the commoner novelistic pleasures. His new book, though, is not only a novel of a recognizable kind, it is also something of a lesson in how novels of its type are constructed. ''First Light'' is the sort of novel in which a collection of modern people gather to open or investigate an ancient site - a ruin, a tomb, an archeological treasure - and are variously affected or changed by their contact with antiquity. There's a horror-novel version in which ancient evil is unleashed to do terrible things to those who have waked it; there's a metaphysical version, a meditation on time and history; there's a comic version too. Mr. Ackroyd's version has many of the genre's standard features and yet is entirely his own. The antiquity of his story is a neolithic tumulus in the (fictional) Pilgrin Valley of Dorsetshire, recently uncovered when a fire destroyed the ash woods that had concealed it. The archeologists who come to open it up are directed by Mark Clare, earnest, conscious of the difficulty of understanding the far past and yet also enunciating one of the standard themes of this sort of story - the hubris of modern science when faced with the dark backward: ''Our goals include total recovery, objective interpretation and comprehensive explanation,'' he tells his staff as work commences, goals that few real archeologists can have ever held and that the reader already guesses are to be baffled.
Someone - or something - does not want the ancient site disturbed, and workers find that not only is their encampment vandalized in the night, but a leaden gloom tends to seep over them during the day as well. Mark Clare is burdened also by the unrelievable sadness of his wife, Kathleen, whose withered leg has crippled her emotionally as well as physically; we are told that it has kept her from having the child she wants and has even prevented her from adopting one. As Mark goes farther underground, Kathleen begins to depart from life. The tumulus and its associated ring of standing stones are of course aligned with the heavens; specifically, they point to the place on the horizon where the Pleiades and the star Aldebaran rise with the dawn at the vernal equinox, or where they so rose 2,500 years ago.
Much is made of the contrast between neolithic astronomers at home in their star temple and deracinated present-day man at large in his immense and meaningless universe. And modern man here is the astronomer Damian Fall, working nightly in an observatory near the tumulus and going rapidly mad under the stress of randomness and infinitude. But not even a mad scientist, if he had ever been truly a scientist, would talk as this one does: ''Ah yes. Science. But who is to say that our science is any better than the science of the astronomer buried in Pilgrin Valley?'' A novel of this sort also needs characters, unlearned but perceptive, who can sense immediately the power of pastness and feel its effects. There is Joey Hanover, a superannuated music-hall comic who has made a hit on television, a sort of English George Burns. He is an orphan who dimly remembers his infancy in the Pilgrin Valley, and who spends his retirement searching for his lost family - whose trail he picks up in the ash wood that once overgrew the tomb. More extravagantly, there are the Mints, father and son, on whose ancient lands the tumulus actually lies, the valley where their kind have lived for centuries. They are clay-booted rurals more hilarious, not always for the right reasons, than I think Mr. Ackroyd intends them to be. We are not surprised to learn that whatever ancient one is buried in the heart of the tomb is kin to the long-memoried Mints.
Mr. Ackroyd's excursion into the comic version of his genre, punched up by the Mints, is carried on by the minor characters, including Martha Temple - the so-called finds supervisor, who has a lovely quality of saying awful things about everyone in such a way as to assert her admiration for and sympathy with them - and Evangeline Tupper and her assistant, Hermione, a grotesquely caricatured and wholly unlikely lesbian couple. Evangeline seems to be (though it is difficult for an American to know exactly) what the English mean by a twit: the sort of silly who combines complete ineffectuality with a rhetoric of absurd hyperbole. ''We may have been attacked by something awfully vengeful and ancient,'' she says. ''Coming from the abysm of time and so forth.'' As the ancient tomb is opened further, the team of scientists is predictably changed by their experience: ''They were becoming more open, more distinctly themselves, less inclined to camouflage; it was as if their own protective layers were being stripped away.'' The comic characters are largely immune, but Mark Clare will find at the center of the subterranean grave, in scenes effectively earthy and ghostly, both surcease and rebirth, an understanding that time is illusion and that the dead are all alive, are not other than ourselves and are made (as are we the living) of the same stuff as the stars. Just because a novel belongs to a recognizable genre doesn't mean it cannot surprise, fascinate, enlighten. Mr. Ackroyd is adept at enriching his narrative with complex connections and evocations. ''First Light'' is best when it is weaving such textures for their own sakes, for the fun of it, without regard for verisimilitude.
But in the weightier or more tragic parts, the slapdash match of fictional and common reality is enough to untether the whole enterprise. Mr. Ackroyd's archeology is only a little more convincing than his astrophysics. The drastic emotions and actions he assigns to a mildly disabled woman come ready-made and remain unexamined. The fragmented Stone Age re-creations are factitious, as are the folklike tales occasionally inserted. Despite the high color and headlong rush of the narrative, the work of the imagination that gives to the expected and the artificial the force of the new and the real has not been done.
John Crowley's latest work of fiction is ''Novelty,'' a collection of four stories.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytim...
First Light (1989) by Peter Ackroyd
1. Characters and Interrelations
* Mark Clare: The lead archaeologist excavating the tumulus in Pilgrin Valley. He is enthusiastic, romantic about the past, and deeply devoted to his wife, Kathleen.
* Kathleen Clare: Mark’s wife. She suffers from a disability (a withered leg) and deep depression. She feels a profound, almost mystical connection to the sadness of the earth and the past.
* Damian Fall: An astronomer at the Holblack Moor Observatory. He is neurotic, fearful of his own mind, and senses a "tremor of uncertainty" in the universe. He lives in Mauve Cottage.
* Evangeline Tupper: A senior civil servant from the Department of the Environment. She is camp, domineering, and cynical, often accompanied by her "assistant" Hermione.
* Hermione Crisp (“Baby Doll”): Evangeline’s loyal, masculine-dressing companion and assistant.
* Joey Hanover: A retired stand-up comedian ("Joey Chuckles"). He is an orphan searching for his birth parents and origins in Dorset. He is eventually revealed to be related to the Mint family.
* Floey Hanover: Joey’s supportive, sharp-tongued wife, a former chorus girl.
* Farmer Mint & Boy Mint: Father and son farmers who own the land around the valley. They are eccentric, seemingly "primitive" guardians of the valley's secrets, representing an ancient, continuous lineage.
* The Archaeological Team:
* Martha Temple: Finds supervisor; outwardly sweet but often manipulates situations to stir trouble.
* Owen Chard: Site surveyor; grumpy, pragmatic, and skeptical.
* Julian Hill: Environmentalist; ambitious and prone to elaborate, mystical theories.
* Augustine Fraicheur: An antique dealer in Lyme Regis who gossips with Evangeline and rents the flat above his shop to the Clares.
* Alec: Damian Fall’s cheerful, competent assistant at the observatory.
2. Plot Summary (Chapter by Chapter)
* Ch 1: The Uncertainty Principle: Astronomer Damian Fall observes the star Aldebaran at Holblack Moor, contemplating the "uncertainty" and chaos of the universe.
* Ch 2: After the Fire: Mark Clare shows Evangeline Tupper the tumulus in Pilgrin Valley, revealed by a forest fire.
* Ch 3: On the Mound: Mark and Evangeline inspect the site; Evangeline feels a strange ancient presence; Mark is enthusiastic about the dig.
* Ch 4: The Valley: Mark drives Evangeline to the station and returns to the valley, sensing a figure in the window of a nearby cottage (Damian’s).
* Ch 5: Some Inhabitants: Mark meets Farmer Mint and Boy Mint, who mockingly predict he will find only "sheep's bones and rabbit's teeth."
* Ch 6: London Lilac: Evangeline visits her elderly father in London, revealing her emotional detachment.
* Ch 7: Waiting: Mark returns home to Lyme Regis to his disabled wife, Kathleen, who is reading about ancient astronomers.
* Ch 8: Earlier Time: A reflection on Kathleen’s childhood, her disability, and her fear of abandonment.
* Ch 9: A Child: Mark and Kathleen discuss their hopes to adopt a child; Mark connects the stars to human faces.
* Ch 10: At the Site: The excavation begins. The team (Owen, Martha, Julian) is introduced. Local children tease them about waking "the old one."
* Ch 11: Field Walking: The team surveys the fields. Martha thinks she sees a figure at the cottage window.
* Ch 12: An Argument: Julian Hill argues that the site is an astronomical observatory; Mark tells a story about flying men in Peru.
* Ch 13-14: A Vision / The Vision Fades: Mark recounts the Peru story to the team and later to Kathleen; Kathleen reveals her inability to escape into stories/worlds like Mark can.
* Ch 15: The Excavation: Evangeline visits the dig again. An ox-bone shovel is discovered, then mysteriously stolen.
* Ch 16: Visitors: Mark and Evangeline visit the Mints’ farm. Evangeline is baffled by their eccentric behavior and "ancient" aura.
* Ch 17-19: The Hanovers: Joey and Floey Hanover are introduced on the beach. Joey is searching for his past. He helps Kathleen after she falls near the Cobb.
* Ch 20: In the Twilight: Kathleen receives a letter delaying their adoption application due to her disability; she sinks into despair.
* Ch 21-22: Invaders: Work continues. The site is vandalized overnight, but only the ox-bone shovel is taken.
* Ch 23-24: Two Ladies: Evangeline and Hermione arrive in Dorset to investigate the vandalism.
* Ch 25-26: The Cottage/Conversation: Mark and Evangeline visit Damian Fall at Mauve Cottage. They see star maps on his walls; Mark realizes the link between archaeology and astronomy.
* Ch 30-34: Progress & Decline: Excavation deepens. Mark and Kathleen’s relationship strains under her depression. Damian Fall struggles with mental instability while observing the red giant star Aldebaran.
* Ch 35: The Entrance: A "blind entrance" to the tomb is found, blocked by a stone slab covered in indecipherable markings.
* Ch 36: Decoding: Mark realizes the markings on the stone are a map of the constellations.
* Ch 37: Guardian Angels: Joey Hanover recognizes Damian’s cottage from his childhood memories.
* Ch 54-55: Cults: New Age travellers and a cult called "Corona" camp in the valley. Evangeline tries to disperse them with a speech but falls off a human pyramid.
* Ch 56-58: Social Maneuvers: The Hanovers settle in; Augustine Fraicheur gossips with Evangeline about the "Mint dinner" (a yearly gathering of the Mint clan).
* Ch 65: Connections: Mark visits the observatory; Alec explains that humans are made of "star stuff," giving Mark a sense of connection between the dead and the living.
* Ch 66: Letters: Mark and Martha enter a newly discovered underground souterrain (tunnel). Mark finds dates scrawled on the roof (e.g., 1586), implying the tomb has been secretly visited for centuries.
* Ch 67-69: The Mint Dinner: Evangeline confronts the Mints about the tunnel. The Mint family holds their annual reunion; Joey Hanover attends, gets drunk, and is told the "truth" about his family and the tomb.
* Ch 70: At the Centre: The archaeologists break through to the central chamber. Mark crawls into a small side tunnel and is struck on the head.
* Ch 76: Think Pink: (Flash forward) Kathleen has committed suicide. Her coffin goes missing before the funeral.
* Ch 77-78: At Last: Mark tracks the coffin to the Hanovers' shed. The Mints arrive to claim "The Old One" (their ancestor in the tomb). Joey opens the ancient coffin and finds a preserved body that begins to "transmit" voices/history.
3. Location: Sense of Time and Place
* Location: The setting oscillates between the subterranean/earthy (Pilgrin Valley, the damp tumulus, the Mints' cluttered farmhouse) and the celestial/scientific (Holblack Moor Observatory, the white dome, computer screens).
* Sense of Place: Dorset is depicted as a "haunted place" with a "human presence," where the landscape itself (chalk, fossils, tumuli) acts as a memory bank. It is earthy, damp, and ancient (The Mints' farm smells of "moth balls and old eau de cologne" or worse; the tomb smells of "old earth").
* Sense of Time:
* Deep Time vs. Present: The novel collapses the distance between the Neolithic period and the present. The stars observed by Damian are light from the past; the fossils Kathleen holds are ancient life; the Mints represent an unbroken lineage that makes 5,000 years seem like yesterday.
* Cyclical Time: The narrative suggests time is not linear. Mark realizes "Nothing is destroyed... everything returns." The dates scrawled in the tomb (1586, 1894) show that the past has never really been "lost," just hidden.
* Scientific vs. Mythic Time: The astronomers measure light-years (scientific), while the Mints and Joey experience time as memory and ancestry (mythic/emotional).
4. List of Oppositions
* Earth / Sky: (The archaeologists digging down vs. the astronomers looking up; the "fogou" underground vs. the "darkened house" of the observatory).
* Light / Darkness: (The strobe lights/torches of the dig vs. the pitch black of the tomb; the "creatures of light" vs. the "darkness" Damian fears).
* Continuity / Interruption: (The Mints' unbroken family line/custodianship vs. the Archaeologists' intrusion/disruption).
* Comedy / Tragedy: (Joey Hanover’s music-hall humor and songs vs. Kathleen Clare’s suicidal depression).
* Revelation / Concealment: (The scientific urge to expose/excavate vs. the Mints' urge to bury/hide/protect).
* Gravity / Flight: (The heavy stones/earth pressing down vs. the myth of the flying men/children turned to stone).
* Ancestry / Adoption: (Joey finding his blood lineage vs. Mark and Kathleen’s failed attempt to adopt a child).
* Preservation / Decay: (The museum holograms Julian dreams of vs. the rotting, damp reality of the actual tomb).
5. Premonitory Glimpses (Quotes)
* "It was twelve feet at its highest point... This long narrow mound might have marked the sudden emergence of some creature now extinct or have represented some ancient and forgotten disease in the landscape."
* "She turned around quickly and peered into the clusters of beech and ash above the valley; and for a moment she thought she saw something moving between the trees."
* "He drove past the house... But he did not notice that the old couple were standing outside the Mints' farmhouse... The house had not changed at all. It might have stood like this for centuries."
* "I feel so many things... but I don't—" (Mark, cut off by Evangeline asking about murders).
* "I saw something. Then I looked down. And then someone pushed me." (Martha Temple after falling).
* "There is something wrong in the valley. Something evil in the tomb. Don't you feel it?" (The traveller in the purple shirt).
* "Everything has to end... All we’re doing is waiting for the end." (Kathleen).
* "It was as if he had confronted some living thing, trapped in the tomb but now rushing towards him."
6. Study Questions
* Astronomy vs. Archaeology: How do the Observatory and the Tumulus function as mirrors of each other in the novel? Consider the concepts of "looking up" (space) and "looking down" (time).
* The Role of the Mints: How does the Mint family challenge the traditional authority of science and history? Discuss their role as "guardians" of the valley.
* Time as a Cycle: Mark Clare concludes that "nothing really dies" and "everything returns." How does the plot structure (e.g., the discovery of the recent dates in the ancient tomb) support this theme of cyclical time?
* Comedy and Tragedy: How does the comic subplot of Joey Hanover and Evangeline Tupper contrast with the tragic arc of Kathleen Clare? Do these tones merge by the end?
* Scientific vs. Intuitive Knowledge: Contrast the way Julian Hill and Owen Chard understand the site (data, theories) with how Kathleen and Joey Hanover understand it (intuition, memory, emotion). Which does the novel suggest is more "true"?
* The Significance of "The Old One": What does the body in the coffin represent to the different characters (a scientific find for the archaeologists vs. an ancestor for the Mints)?
* Kathleen’s Disability and Connection: How does Kathleen’s physical disability serve as a metaphor for her connection to the "broken" or "ancient" aspects of the landscape?
* The Symbolism of Light: Analyze the title First Light. How does light function as a symbol in the contexts of the stars, the fire that revealed the tomb, and the "light" inside the characters?
* Satire of Bureaucracy: How does Ackroyd use the character of Evangeline Tupper to satirize modern bureaucratic attitudes toward heritage and the environment?
* The Unknowable Past: The archaeologists find artifacts from vastly different eras mixed together. What is the novel suggesting about the reliability of historical dating and the linear narrative of history?
Something Vengeful and Ancient September 17, 1989
Something Vengeful and Ancient By JOHN CROWLEY
FIRST LIGHT By Peter Ackroyd.
Peter Ackroyd is the author of several innovative fictions as interesting for the forms he fashions for them as for the commoner novelistic pleasures. His new book, though, is not only a novel of a recognizable kind, it is also something of a lesson in how novels of its type are constructed. ''First Light'' is the sort of novel in which a collection of modern people gather to open or investigate an ancient site - a ruin, a tomb, an archeological treasure - and are variously affected or changed by their contact with antiquity. There's a horror-novel version in which ancient evil is unleashed to do terrible things to those who have waked it; there's a metaphysical version, a meditation on time and history; there's a comic version too. Mr. Ackroyd's version has many of the genre's standard features and yet is entirely his own. The antiquity of his story is a neolithic tumulus in the (fictional) Pilgrin Valley of Dorsetshire, recently uncovered when a fire destroyed the ash woods that had concealed it. The archeologists who come to open it up are directed by Mark Clare, earnest, conscious of the difficulty of understanding the far past and yet also enunciating one of the standard themes of this sort of story - the hubris of modern science when faced with the dark backward: ''Our goals include total recovery, objective interpretation and comprehensive explanation,'' he tells his staff as work commences, goals that few real archeologists can have ever held and that the reader already guesses are to be baffled.
Someone - or something - does not want the ancient site disturbed, and workers find that not only is their encampment vandalized in the night, but a leaden gloom tends to seep over them during the day as well. Mark Clare is burdened also by the unrelievable sadness of his wife, Kathleen, whose withered leg has crippled her emotionally as well as physically; we are told that it has kept her from having the child she wants and has even prevented her from adopting one. As Mark goes farther underground, Kathleen begins to depart from life. The tumulus and its associated ring of standing stones are of course aligned with the heavens; specifically, they point to the place on the horizon where the Pleiades and the star Aldebaran rise with the dawn at the vernal equinox, or where they so rose 2,500 years ago.
Much is made of the contrast between neolithic astronomers at home in their star temple and deracinated present-day man at large in his immense and meaningless universe. And modern man here is the astronomer Damian Fall, working nightly in an observatory near the tumulus and going rapidly mad under the stress of randomness and infinitude. But not even a mad scientist, if he had ever been truly a scientist, would talk as this one does: ''Ah yes. Science. But who is to say that our science is any better than the science of the astronomer buried in Pilgrin Valley?'' A novel of this sort also needs characters, unlearned but perceptive, who can sense immediately the power of pastness and feel its effects. There is Joey Hanover, a superannuated music-hall comic who has made a hit on television, a sort of English George Burns. He is an orphan who dimly remembers his infancy in the Pilgrin Valley, and who spends his retirement searching for his lost family - whose trail he picks up in the ash wood that once overgrew the tomb. More extravagantly, there are the Mints, father and son, on whose ancient lands the tumulus actually lies, the valley where their kind have lived for centuries. They are clay-booted rurals more hilarious, not always for the right reasons, than I think Mr. Ackroyd intends them to be. We are not surprised to learn that whatever ancient one is buried in the heart of the tomb is kin to the long-memoried Mints.
Mr. Ackroyd's excursion into the comic version of his genre, punched up by the Mints, is carried on by the minor characters, including Martha Temple - the so-called finds supervisor, who has a lovely quality of saying awful things about everyone in such a way as to assert her admiration for and sympathy with them - and Evangeline Tupper and her assistant, Hermione, a grotesquely caricatured and wholly unlikely lesbian couple. Evangeline seems to be (though it is difficult for an American to know exactly) what the English mean by a twit: the sort of silly who combines complete ineffectuality with a rhetoric of absurd hyperbole. ''We may have been attacked by something awfully vengeful and ancient,'' she says. ''Coming from the abysm of time and so forth.'' As the ancient tomb is opened further, the team of scientists is predictably changed by their experience: ''They were becoming more open, more distinctly themselves, less inclined to camouflage; it was as if their own protective layers were being stripped away.'' The comic characters are largely immune, but Mark Clare will find at the center of the subterranean grave, in scenes effectively earthy and ghostly, both surcease and rebirth, an understanding that time is illusion and that the dead are all alive, are not other than ourselves and are made (as are we the living) of the same stuff as the stars. Just because a novel belongs to a recognizable genre doesn't mean it cannot surprise, fascinate, enlighten. Mr. Ackroyd is adept at enriching his narrative with complex connections and evocations. ''First Light'' is best when it is weaving such textures for their own sakes, for the fun of it, without regard for verisimilitude.
But in the weightier or more tragic parts, the slapdash match of fictional and common reality is enough to untether the whole enterprise. Mr. Ackroyd's archeology is only a little more convincing than his astrophysics. The drastic emotions and actions he assigns to a mildly disabled woman come ready-made and remain unexamined. The fragmented Stone Age re-creations are factitious, as are the folklike tales occasionally inserted. Despite the high color and headlong rush of the narrative, the work of the imagination that gives to the expected and the artificial the force of the new and the real has not been done.
John Crowley's latest work of fiction is ''Novelty,'' a collection of four stories.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytim...
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 14, 2014
Atmospheric, immersive, melancholic and ultimately anti-climactic. Ackroyd has ability but in this book seems to create slightly hollow characters, that are set up to be caricatures of themselves, which is amusing at first, but limiting in the end. The role-reversed lesbian couple, the retired stand-up and his malapropistic wife, the seemingly simple but oddly disquieting farmer and son, the astronomer desperate in his mediocrity, and the tragic archeologist with his crippled wife invite curiosity but do not inspire empathy. The book is clever without being satisfying, marvelling at some of the construction but oddly less moved than one would expect.
March 16, 2018
I like the themes of archaeology & astronomy woven together. This is definitely an oddball book. I have never read Peter Ackroyd & didn't know what to expect yet it's theme resonated with me.
Quote from Damian:
Did you hear how I was caught in the underground passage for a while? It was there I first realised it. That I first understood how nothing really dies. Just because we are trapped in time, we assume that there is only one direction to go. But when we are dead, when we are out of time, everything returns. Everything is part of everything else. . . Someone once told me a wonderful thing. He told me that our bodies are made out of dead stars. We carry their light inside us. So everything goes back. Everything is part of the pattern. We carry our origin within us, and we can never rest until we have returned.
As a meditator this quote resonates with me. Reminds me of the Stephen Hawking quote: Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet . . .
Quote from Damian:
Did you hear how I was caught in the underground passage for a while? It was there I first realised it. That I first understood how nothing really dies. Just because we are trapped in time, we assume that there is only one direction to go. But when we are dead, when we are out of time, everything returns. Everything is part of everything else. . . Someone once told me a wonderful thing. He told me that our bodies are made out of dead stars. We carry their light inside us. So everything goes back. Everything is part of the pattern. We carry our origin within us, and we can never rest until we have returned.
As a meditator this quote resonates with me. Reminds me of the Stephen Hawking quote: Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet . . .
August 14, 2019
I checked it out on a whim and was not disappointed. A very enjoyable read with a lot of pulpy goodness.
Read
January 30, 2022 A collection of archaeologists, astronomers, and various others try and make sense of a pre-historical find in Dorset, the complexities of human existence.
July 22, 2023
My first Ackroyd book, and I want more! The unusual setting of a tumulus excavation in rural Dorset is peopled somewhat exotically by archaeologists, astronomers, quirky yokels, a screechingly insincere lesbian civil servant and her partner, and a retired music-hall comic and his wife.
I loved it. The chapters are really short, which is a bonus for me as this encourages me to read to the end of the next one . . . and the one after that . . . and the one after that . . . .
And the delightful, unforgettable names! Damian Fall, the angst-ridden astronomer. Evangeline Tupper who is something in the Department of the Environment, and her tweedy, no-nonsense partner Hermione Crisp, addressed by the utterly inappropriate soubriquet Baby Doll by Evangeline. Farmer Mint and his son, Boy Mint, the last of a centuries-long family of Mints who have laboured in the valley. Mark Clare, Martha Temple and Owen Chard, members of the archaeology team. Joey Hanover, a retired comic and singer, and Joey's wife Floey. Augustine Fraicheur, an antique dealer who would fit in perfectly well to the world of "Mapp and Lucia". Lola Trout, the foul-mouthed doyenne of the village of Colcorum. Wonderful characters.
All these are pulled together in an extraordinary tale about the excavation of the tumulus and the gradual unfolding - or not? - of its ancient secrets. I recommend this book highly.
I loved it. The chapters are really short, which is a bonus for me as this encourages me to read to the end of the next one . . . and the one after that . . . and the one after that . . . .
And the delightful, unforgettable names! Damian Fall, the angst-ridden astronomer. Evangeline Tupper who is something in the Department of the Environment, and her tweedy, no-nonsense partner Hermione Crisp, addressed by the utterly inappropriate soubriquet Baby Doll by Evangeline. Farmer Mint and his son, Boy Mint, the last of a centuries-long family of Mints who have laboured in the valley. Mark Clare, Martha Temple and Owen Chard, members of the archaeology team. Joey Hanover, a retired comic and singer, and Joey's wife Floey. Augustine Fraicheur, an antique dealer who would fit in perfectly well to the world of "Mapp and Lucia". Lola Trout, the foul-mouthed doyenne of the village of Colcorum. Wonderful characters.
All these are pulled together in an extraordinary tale about the excavation of the tumulus and the gradual unfolding - or not? - of its ancient secrets. I recommend this book highly.
February 17, 2025
Aus einem nie erschienen Artikel für ein Jahrbuch, 1993 geschrieben.
Peter Ackroyd, der die Literatur selbst und Schriftsteller in den Mittelpunkt seines nicht phantastischen Werke stellt und in Großbritannien als großes Talent gilt, hat nun schon seinen zweiten "Schauerroman" geschrieben. In "Die Uhr in Gottes Händen" bleibt Ackroyd seinem Thema, dem Fortbestehen des Vergangenen in die Gegenwart treu. Bei der Ausgrabung eines Megalithgrabs in Dorset häufen sich mysteriöse Vorfälle; auch scheint das Grab mehr Rätsel aufzugeben, als das gelöst werden können. Das Phantastische ist hier in der Ausstrahlung eines Ortes begründet. Auch die Personen sind in diesem faszinierenden Roman lebensnah und facettenreich geschildert. Gegenüber dem ersten Roman "Der Fall des Baumeisters" hat sich Ackroyd klar gesteigert.
Nachtrag: Dieser Roman ist auch ein gutes Beispiel für das Genre Mystery.
Peter Ackroyd, der die Literatur selbst und Schriftsteller in den Mittelpunkt seines nicht phantastischen Werke stellt und in Großbritannien als großes Talent gilt, hat nun schon seinen zweiten "Schauerroman" geschrieben. In "Die Uhr in Gottes Händen" bleibt Ackroyd seinem Thema, dem Fortbestehen des Vergangenen in die Gegenwart treu. Bei der Ausgrabung eines Megalithgrabs in Dorset häufen sich mysteriöse Vorfälle; auch scheint das Grab mehr Rätsel aufzugeben, als das gelöst werden können. Das Phantastische ist hier in der Ausstrahlung eines Ortes begründet. Auch die Personen sind in diesem faszinierenden Roman lebensnah und facettenreich geschildert. Gegenüber dem ersten Roman "Der Fall des Baumeisters" hat sich Ackroyd klar gesteigert.
Nachtrag: Dieser Roman ist auch ein gutes Beispiel für das Genre Mystery.
March 12, 2023
A typically haunting and genre busting book from Peter Ackroyd about our connection to the landscape, ideas of family, archaeology, space and time. I really enjoyed this short read. At times it was spine-tinglingly spooky and at others it reached farce. I don't think there was a single 'normal' character, but that just added to the fun
April 11, 2013
Spooky.
Depressing!
Not the best Ackroyd, a bit heavy going. For some reason though I have read it twice. Still not sure exactly what happens.
Depressing!
Not the best Ackroyd, a bit heavy going. For some reason though I have read it twice. Still not sure exactly what happens.
October 12, 2024
"First Light begins with an ominous coincidence: the reappearance of the ancient night sky during the excavation of an astronomically aligned Neolithic grave in Dorset. Add to this a group of wonderful eccentrics—archaeologists, astronomers, a civil servant, a stand-up comic, local rustics—who converge on the site to disturb the quiet seclusion of Pilgrin Valley.
Someone (or something) is trying to sabotage the best efforts of the excavators, headed by Mark Clare, to unearth the dormant secrets of the burial ground. Meanwhile, at the nearby observatory, astronomer Damien Fall, his telescope focused on the red star Aldebaran, is unnerved by the deeper significance he imputes to the celestial sophistication of the region’s ancient inhabitants. And Joey Hanover, a retired music-hall and TV entertainer searching for his own past, has learned secrets from Farmer Mint and his son, Boy, the weirdly cryptic guardians of their ancestral home in the valley. What do all these, among others, have in common?
All is masterfully woven into an immensely engaging and entertaining novel—a suspenseful reflection on life, nature, and the cosmos, and above all an illuminating and enchanting story."
This was a weird book. First, it started with disparate chapters about disparate people who didn't seem to have any connection to each other at all. But once they did come together, it didn't seem to make sense -- they didn't fit together. And then, there was the intimation that the figure in the long barrow was ancient, and then the intimation that it wasn't, and then the intimation that the barrow had been visited many times in the recent past even though it was completely entombed in earth. And how did the head archaeologist's wife's suicide fit in?
I finished it, but the ending didn't make any more sense than the beginning did. The archaeology bits were nicely done though.
Someone (or something) is trying to sabotage the best efforts of the excavators, headed by Mark Clare, to unearth the dormant secrets of the burial ground. Meanwhile, at the nearby observatory, astronomer Damien Fall, his telescope focused on the red star Aldebaran, is unnerved by the deeper significance he imputes to the celestial sophistication of the region’s ancient inhabitants. And Joey Hanover, a retired music-hall and TV entertainer searching for his own past, has learned secrets from Farmer Mint and his son, Boy, the weirdly cryptic guardians of their ancestral home in the valley. What do all these, among others, have in common?
All is masterfully woven into an immensely engaging and entertaining novel—a suspenseful reflection on life, nature, and the cosmos, and above all an illuminating and enchanting story."
This was a weird book. First, it started with disparate chapters about disparate people who didn't seem to have any connection to each other at all. But once they did come together, it didn't seem to make sense -- they didn't fit together. And then, there was the intimation that the figure in the long barrow was ancient, and then the intimation that it wasn't, and then the intimation that the barrow had been visited many times in the recent past even though it was completely entombed in earth. And how did the head archaeologist's wife's suicide fit in?
I finished it, but the ending didn't make any more sense than the beginning did. The archaeology bits were nicely done though.
April 4, 2024
Ackroyd wins on his campy caricatures, dusky archaic atmosphere, and sustained suspense. It's sprinkled with star dust (in us all) for a sense of the immortal, while the archaeologists peel back layers around the cold stone to invest a sense of time immemorial. So far so good. However, I found a disharmony between the silliness and the serious that for me prevented 'First Light' from attaining steady luminescence. Evangeline as a case in point is a besuited lesbian besotted with ultra-butch 'Baby Doll', whose delightful daftness just jars with tragic arc of Kathleen Clare. Whereas Evangeline presents as a sadistically superficial uber-bitch (what is not to like), Kathleen trails a wan gloom direct from Goethe. The salty and sweet mix to make a sort of Gothy Carry-On. It is Barbara Windsor meets The Cure, via Time Team.
Its oddness could be a virtue and it certainly kept me interested but it was dessert with savoury canapés on top, with no really good palate cleanser or digestif to end on. There is a caper complete with pitchforks that pitches this towards the daft, which is a shame given the haunting creepiness that Ackroyd achieves on-and-off throughout. It was like Ackroyd couldn't decide whether he wanted this to be comedy, tragedy or philosophy, so the whole tends towards a cauldron where eye of newt is tossed in with a Snickers bar. The final flavour is weird without really managing to be wonderful.
Its oddness could be a virtue and it certainly kept me interested but it was dessert with savoury canapés on top, with no really good palate cleanser or digestif to end on. There is a caper complete with pitchforks that pitches this towards the daft, which is a shame given the haunting creepiness that Ackroyd achieves on-and-off throughout. It was like Ackroyd couldn't decide whether he wanted this to be comedy, tragedy or philosophy, so the whole tends towards a cauldron where eye of newt is tossed in with a Snickers bar. The final flavour is weird without really managing to be wonderful.
March 2, 2021
An astronomer works nights in an observatory in Dorset. Nearby an archaeologist with a crippled wife excavates a tumulus around which strange shapes flit. A retired TV comedian whose act is based upon the innocent malapropisms of his wife seeks a cottage he remembers. And are the local yokels comical or sinister?
It is written in the past tense, head-hopping between the PoVs of a number of characters in very short chapters. Perhaps because of the location, I felt the literary ghosts of Thomas Hardy and John Cowper Powys.
In some ways this is typical of much of Ackroyd's work: normal life encounters a supernatural element. There are some extravagant, almost Dickensian characters (the city-living representative from the government who pretends to be wildly enthusiastic about everything as a PR technique was my favourite) and the exuberance of the portrayal more than compensated for the stereotyping (of, for example, the farmer, the camp antique dealer, and the comedian). But the plot seemed very hackneyed: archaeologists disturb ancient and occult powers.
It is written in the past tense, head-hopping between the PoVs of a number of characters in very short chapters. Perhaps because of the location, I felt the literary ghosts of Thomas Hardy and John Cowper Powys.
In some ways this is typical of much of Ackroyd's work: normal life encounters a supernatural element. There are some extravagant, almost Dickensian characters (the city-living representative from the government who pretends to be wildly enthusiastic about everything as a PR technique was my favourite) and the exuberance of the portrayal more than compensated for the stereotyping (of, for example, the farmer, the camp antique dealer, and the comedian). But the plot seemed very hackneyed: archaeologists disturb ancient and occult powers.
June 2, 2024
It was intriguing and kept me reading for the whole novel. The intricate mixing of different people's lives and the connection with the archaeological find was also interesting. However, the gay couple were portrayed oddly and I could never fathom their personalities, so a lot of their actions seemed out of place. I was disappointed with the ending as it incorporated a very different explanation that had never been previously mentioned or touched on, while other parts of unfinished story seemed to just fade into oblivion with no conclusion.
Read
February 11, 2025I was in the midst of reading a novel in which the narrator described postponement/ avoidance of work by picking up a Peter Ackroyd novel to look at instead. Since I had this one sitting in my Reid pile, I did exactly what the other books suggested. It's a very funny book, but also very melancholy. The characters are sometimes engaging, sometimes annoying. It's hard to know how much of it to take seriously. Much like life itself. No matter what the specifics, the encroachment of the past upon the present why cat is serious enough, and that theme runs throughout.
February 11, 2017
Ackroyd is a writer of some standing. I actually enjoy his nonfiction to his fiction. I liked the idea of this book- the mixture of archaeology and astronomy was intriguing to me, but I found his characters and their dialogue stilted and unrealistic and the ultimate conclusion unconvincing and and unsatisfying. Their were many lovely descriptions and ideas, but overall it was a little disappointing.
February 9, 2023
Archeology and Sci Fi and pondering human existence? I'm sold.
"so everything connects? Everything is part of a pattern."
"Yes. If only we knew what it was. But I suppose, I suppose that we could only see the pattern if we were outside it. And in that case we would have ceased to exist. So all we can do is make up our stories.
We don't know more than ancient astronomers. We just know different things."
"so everything connects? Everything is part of a pattern."
"Yes. If only we knew what it was. But I suppose, I suppose that we could only see the pattern if we were outside it. And in that case we would have ceased to exist. So all we can do is make up our stories.
We don't know more than ancient astronomers. We just know different things."
December 18, 2021
Sounds great but I don't remember it
November 18, 2023
Campery collides with philosophical contemplation of the universe and a sitcom worthy cast of characters entertains en route to Ackroyd's trademark haunting residues, post-read.
February 27, 2011
CHECKED OUT THE BOOK FROM MY PUBLIC LIBRARY.
Review/Rating:
3 out of 5
With the discovery of an ancient astronomically aligned grave site in Dorset, everyone is excited over it — well, pretty much everyone. You see, something or someone is doing its best to sabotage and scare the archaeologists, led by Mark Clare, from digging there and Pilgrin Valley. How is it that something as small as a grave site will bring together a group of people, who seem to have nothing in common with each other?
I’ll be honest with you. I absolutely hated this book. :| And it isn’t because of a lack of descriptions, which I love to have in the novels I read. I’ll continue with the reasons why I didn’t like the book in another paragraph since there are a lot of them. :( Oh, yeah, there might be some spoilers about the book toward the end of the review. :X
The first thing I didn’t like about this book is that it was really redundant, which is one of the reasons why the book was extremely slow-moving. The slow-moving plot is another thing I didn’t like about the book. It took about 100 pages just to get the characters digging and for the something/someone to sabotage the dig. Then, it went back to slow-moving until the last couple of chapters. The slow-moving gets kind of annoying, so I suggest just reading 20 pages each time you read, then take a break, and then start reading again. It kind of eases the pain of it. ;) Oh, also, the book kind of jumps from one point to another, which may confuse you if you don’t take breaks to think about it.
Another thing, I found the characters rather, umm, boring and depressing. I’m used to reading books where it shows different personalities for each character, like them being happy, sad, etc. In this book, they remain their depressing selves. I can just imagine a frown on all their faces everyday.I think that’s also what made it slow-moving because the characters were a little too depressing for me. :(
That’s pretty much the only things I didn’t like about this novel, now for the things I did like about it. Even though it is very slow-moving, the characters are depressing, and very little action, I liked how the descriptions were always there, no matter how boring it got. I know I say the book is “boring”, but in a weird way, it isn’t. The author uses poetry, metaphors, descriptions that make it a little less boring, and the author also uses the poetry to bring out a deeper meaning than just having a plot.
I read online that some people might be confused about the ending of the book. I have my own opinions about what it means. Think about it like this the theme mostly is about stars and how everything is connected in some sort of way, it is also about time, change, and death. At the end of the book, the characters realize that even though their find is old, the person’s family, still has the right to send them back to the sky to be stars (which you may say God, in some sort of way). Also, that as stars, the souls can still be with their loved ones and watch over them. And that to see every star (soul) in the sky, will be nothing but light, which is what one of the characters sees at the end of the book. Well, I that’s what I think what the ending means, whether it is right or not, I don’t know.
Also, I know I put “supernatural” and “horror” as the genre, but it isn’t really supernatural or horror. I just put that because of the summary on the back of the book. Unless you scare easily or are very superstitious, it won’t be those genre for you. :)
I rated it a three mostly because of the deeper meaning… I would have rated it a two, that is, if it didn’t have that deeper meaning that I like so much. ;) So don’t read, if you don’t like slow-moving, redundant novels. Also, you have to figure out the deeper meaning to really enjoy the book, but you have to get through the parts I found annoying first. :D
Review/Rating:
3 out of 5
With the discovery of an ancient astronomically aligned grave site in Dorset, everyone is excited over it — well, pretty much everyone. You see, something or someone is doing its best to sabotage and scare the archaeologists, led by Mark Clare, from digging there and Pilgrin Valley. How is it that something as small as a grave site will bring together a group of people, who seem to have nothing in common with each other?
I’ll be honest with you. I absolutely hated this book. :| And it isn’t because of a lack of descriptions, which I love to have in the novels I read. I’ll continue with the reasons why I didn’t like the book in another paragraph since there are a lot of them. :( Oh, yeah, there might be some spoilers about the book toward the end of the review. :X
The first thing I didn’t like about this book is that it was really redundant, which is one of the reasons why the book was extremely slow-moving. The slow-moving plot is another thing I didn’t like about the book. It took about 100 pages just to get the characters digging and for the something/someone to sabotage the dig. Then, it went back to slow-moving until the last couple of chapters. The slow-moving gets kind of annoying, so I suggest just reading 20 pages each time you read, then take a break, and then start reading again. It kind of eases the pain of it. ;) Oh, also, the book kind of jumps from one point to another, which may confuse you if you don’t take breaks to think about it.
Another thing, I found the characters rather, umm, boring and depressing. I’m used to reading books where it shows different personalities for each character, like them being happy, sad, etc. In this book, they remain their depressing selves. I can just imagine a frown on all their faces everyday.I think that’s also what made it slow-moving because the characters were a little too depressing for me. :(
That’s pretty much the only things I didn’t like about this novel, now for the things I did like about it. Even though it is very slow-moving, the characters are depressing, and very little action, I liked how the descriptions were always there, no matter how boring it got. I know I say the book is “boring”, but in a weird way, it isn’t. The author uses poetry, metaphors, descriptions that make it a little less boring, and the author also uses the poetry to bring out a deeper meaning than just having a plot.
I read online that some people might be confused about the ending of the book. I have my own opinions about what it means. Think about it like this the theme mostly is about stars and how everything is connected in some sort of way, it is also about time, change, and death. At the end of the book, the characters realize that even though their find is old, the person’s family, still has the right to send them back to the sky to be stars (which you may say God, in some sort of way). Also, that as stars, the souls can still be with their loved ones and watch over them. And that to see every star (soul) in the sky, will be nothing but light, which is what one of the characters sees at the end of the book. Well, I that’s what I think what the ending means, whether it is right or not, I don’t know.
Also, I know I put “supernatural” and “horror” as the genre, but it isn’t really supernatural or horror. I just put that because of the summary on the back of the book. Unless you scare easily or are very superstitious, it won’t be those genre for you. :)
I rated it a three mostly because of the deeper meaning… I would have rated it a two, that is, if it didn’t have that deeper meaning that I like so much. ;) So don’t read, if you don’t like slow-moving, redundant novels. Also, you have to figure out the deeper meaning to really enjoy the book, but you have to get through the parts I found annoying first. :D
January 28, 2024
I am re-reading this as a precursor to re-reading Philip Pullman's out-of-print and disowned first novel The Haunted Storm. When I read The Haunted Storm it put me in mind of to other novels I had read, one was this one, Peter Ackroyd's First Light, and one was The Bell. I'll read them both again before coming back to The Haunted Storm.
At first I wondered why the fourth (?) novel by a famous author would be out-of-print, but though I enjoyed it I have come away from this second reading a bit bemused. The almost mystical obsession with astronomy, the blend of funny and mystical, … it didn't quite work.
At first I wondered why the fourth (?) novel by a famous author would be out-of-print, but though I enjoyed it I have come away from this second reading a bit bemused. The almost mystical obsession with astronomy, the blend of funny and mystical, … it didn't quite work.
August 5, 2016
In which, notwithstanding the lack of an actual murder, Peter Ackroyd does 'Midsomer Murders'.
This is a weird book, all the more so because it seems so un-weird compared to Ackroyd's usual stuff. It's almost a mainstream story. It features characters who engage in dialogue of the modern-day variety. No historical characters are involved. Granted, most people are engulfed with the weight of melancholy for much of the time, and the Astronomer Damian Fall has been written by the automatic Peter Ackroyd character-generation bot. And, this being Ackroyd, Dorset can't just be Dorset, but is a mysterious landscape whose history is bored into its very rocks, where generations of (etc, etc).
In Martha Temple, Ackroyd's created a character of joyous loathsomeness - I wanted another side of hers to emerge. And I had this nagging feeling that the pacing didn't quite work; the later bits should have come a little earlier and so long. And when, in the final standoff, the rural farmer shouts to his son: 'get the pitchforks!' you can't help but laugh at the dialogue, although the other characters are laughing with us - the clunkiness is deliberate, and the sound of an author having fun. So not 'The Wicker Man' but rather 'Midsomer Murders' - and all very enjoyable.
This is a weird book, all the more so because it seems so un-weird compared to Ackroyd's usual stuff. It's almost a mainstream story. It features characters who engage in dialogue of the modern-day variety. No historical characters are involved. Granted, most people are engulfed with the weight of melancholy for much of the time, and the Astronomer Damian Fall has been written by the automatic Peter Ackroyd character-generation bot. And, this being Ackroyd, Dorset can't just be Dorset, but is a mysterious landscape whose history is bored into its very rocks, where generations of (etc, etc).
In Martha Temple, Ackroyd's created a character of joyous loathsomeness - I wanted another side of hers to emerge. And I had this nagging feeling that the pacing didn't quite work; the later bits should have come a little earlier and so long. And when, in the final standoff, the rural farmer shouts to his son: 'get the pitchforks!' you can't help but laugh at the dialogue, although the other characters are laughing with us - the clunkiness is deliberate, and the sound of an author having fun. So not 'The Wicker Man' but rather 'Midsomer Murders' - and all very enjoyable.
January 13, 2016
Ackroyd's "mystic" novels are always good reads, mixing threads across history - the influence of the past on the present - with dark and threatening plots. Hawksmoor is perhaps the most effective of these. First Light certainly has its good share of suspense and mystery, so it draws the reader on in its at times frenetic pace
First Light brings in a lot of humour and that helps increase the tension built up in the central plot. But the characters - not all of them minor! - creating this light-hearted (at times burlesque, in the original English meaning of the word) environment are often too big, too dominant in the story. What could (or perhaps should) have been incidental highlights make the main focus seem less important. Is it a threatening, dark and complex thriller, or a comedy? Well it feels like neither, really.
It is a good read, though. I liked it and might easily have given it a four star rating if it were not for this flaw. While Dickens gets away with it in Bleak House, I'm afraid Ackroyd doesn't quite make it in First Light.
First Light brings in a lot of humour and that helps increase the tension built up in the central plot. But the characters - not all of them minor! - creating this light-hearted (at times burlesque, in the original English meaning of the word) environment are often too big, too dominant in the story. What could (or perhaps should) have been incidental highlights make the main focus seem less important. Is it a threatening, dark and complex thriller, or a comedy? Well it feels like neither, really.
It is a good read, though. I liked it and might easily have given it a four star rating if it were not for this flaw. While Dickens gets away with it in Bleak House, I'm afraid Ackroyd doesn't quite make it in First Light.
January 27, 2017
Took much longer than I thought I would to complete the book. NO credit taken away from the book though. I haven't read much science fiction but the idea of reading something with a mix of science (astronomy, archaeology), human relationships, and mystery sounded just about right.
I picked this book as a run up to reading the Foundation series from Asimov. I'm not even sure if First Light is the right place to start for it, but I'm glad I picked it. The story develops from multiple points of view and slowly culminates in one location / event. There were no lose ends through the story development and (spoiler alert) discovering that the Mints were aware of the tumulus all along and held sacred the sarcophagus inside becomes evident with about a tenth of the book to go. I was hoping for a more transcendental explanation to the happenings, but Ackroyd did not deprive me of the mystery element with his more human and simplistic conclusion.
3/5 definitely and would surely go back to reading more from him, though not immediately.
I picked this book as a run up to reading the Foundation series from Asimov. I'm not even sure if First Light is the right place to start for it, but I'm glad I picked it. The story develops from multiple points of view and slowly culminates in one location / event. There were no lose ends through the story development and (spoiler alert) discovering that the Mints were aware of the tumulus all along and held sacred the sarcophagus inside becomes evident with about a tenth of the book to go. I was hoping for a more transcendental explanation to the happenings, but Ackroyd did not deprive me of the mystery element with his more human and simplistic conclusion.
3/5 definitely and would surely go back to reading more from him, though not immediately.
January 13, 2013
I believe this was his first novel and the developmental aspect shows. Still, it is an interesting read if only because it shows some indications of Ackroyd's gifts as a writer which become much clearer in his later works of non-fiction, which include London: Biography of a City and the most recent Foundation. Ackroyd weaves history into this novel but without the deftness that is the hallmark of his later works such as Doctor Dee.
Want to read
September 17, 2011I have already developed polarity issues with this book and I haven't even read it yet. I am at once both repelled by it and, at the same time, strangely drawn to it all because of its subject matter... am bumping this toward the top of the pile in order to deal with the aforementioned issues. Time will tell.
May 21, 2009
By turns funny, grim (as befits a book echoing Thomas Hardy), eerie and above all thought-inspiring. An archaeological dig in Dorset has unexpected consequences for a broad cast of characters, some fortunate and some less so.
August 25, 2009
This book was hard for me to understand. I read it through wanting to finally find out how all the characters came together. A lot is going on as you read...many characters to follow. I still don't quite get the ending.
April 22, 2014
A delightful oddball comic novel.
If you're expecting seriousness about history, don't read it. If slapstick, farce, and 19th c. music hall humor work for you, then there's a hefty chance you'll enjoy it as much as I did.
If you're expecting seriousness about history, don't read it. If slapstick, farce, and 19th c. music hall humor work for you, then there's a hefty chance you'll enjoy it as much as I did.
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