Tasked with providing either historical fact or sensationalist quasi-fiction, biographers face a tough challenge. Peter Ackroyd, in this short look at the life of nineteenth-century Gothic writer Edgar Allan Poe, at first seems torn between factual and fictional approaches. While, early on, he condemns other biographers’ ‘invention’, he himself cannot decide whether to exaggerate or to detail. Ackroyd’s prose is terse and brusque, and yet it often contains overblown and melodramatic assertions. He references a wide range of evidence, but rarely seeks to question its validity or reliability. He finds drama and mystery where there is none – most obviously in his over-dramatisation of Poe’s more-or-less straightforwardly alcohol-induced death – and he patronises his readers with swooping declarations which merely highlight the disparity between the sources he cites and the conclusions he reaches.
Yet while Ackroyd has no great ability as a historian, he is masterful in his handling of Poe’s literary oeuvre, and his evident passion for it is pleasingly contagious. He provides insightful glimpses into the American’s greatest works – including ‘The Raven’’ and ‘The Fall of The House of Usher’ – and boldly connects their content with both the author’s psychological state and events in his life. This isn’t just a chronicle of Poe’s unhappy childhood, inebriated adult life and needy relationships with women; it’s also a daring orientation of Poe’s many different bookish endeavours within their immediate literary context. You finish it unenthused by its subject’s drab personal life, but craving a Poe anthology.
