Set in early twentieth-century England, English Music is the coming of age story of Tim Harcombe, the son of a faith healer and magician named Clement. While Ackroyd is more explicitly nationalist than Harold Bloom, the difference between the two is finally one of degree and not kind, for English Music illuminates how the celebration of an allegedly transcendent tradition works to support a conservative cultural agenda: reacting to the perceived threat of an increasingly diverse, multi-cultural society, Ackroyd spatializes British literary tradition in an attempt to recuperate the cultural legacy of the white English male. As he weds this mystified concept of national character to British artistic heritage, Ackroyd at once dramatizes Eliot's spatialized model of literary inheritance and aligns himself with recent defenders of the Western canon. Stressing the overwhelming authority of tradition, English Music celebrates a timeless national spirit reflected in British art and literature, and mystifies this spirit by presenting it as an irrational and ungovernable force working throughout history. Ultimately, however, the novel may be most interesting as part of a brand of intellectual conservatism that runs from T.S. English Music thus forces the reconsideration of the supposedly inherent link between a postmodern interrogation of traditional forms of representation and a celebration of cultural diversity.
And in a detailed reading of the Ackroyd's narrative strategy, Jim Collins argues that "The intertextual infrastructure of Ackroyd's novel is as elaborate as The Name of the Rose," but it ultimately "serves as the basis of an extended exercise in cultural restoration, resulting in a bizarre amalgamation of Umberto Eco and Allan Bloom" (61). Now we know there can be such a thing" (32). Michael Levenson, for example, wryly notes that "Ackroyd is the Tory postmodernist. The disparity between style and ideology here has been the subject of much of the early criticism of the novel. In contrast to an eclectic style usually associated with the celebration of diversity and an acknowledgment of contingency, however, the novel champions a tradition of white male English artists that is decidedly conservative. Employing tropes closely associated with postmodern fiction, Ackroyd's novel presents the story of the main character, Tim Harcombe, as a series of set-pieces in which he inhabits storylines and landscapes drawn from a number of classic English writers and painters such as Daniel DeFoe, William Blake, and Charles Dickens. The most striking feature of Peter Ackroyd's novel English Music (1992) is the incongruity between its postmodern narrative tactics and the conservative ideal of British identity it celebrates. God Save the Canon: Tradition and the British Subject in Peter Ackroyd's English Music
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