An odyssey into oddness

Fiction: An ageing suitor falls to his knees before a young Greek woman and makes his intentions clear - she is to be his wife. A formal proposal is not forthcoming because he knows what he wants. He tells her she will be his Penelope.

The future Mrs Obermann notes a scar on his bald head, the result of an encounter with a fragment of the statue of Zeus, on the island of Ithaca. Heinrich Obermann, a German archaeologist, is a maverick who plays only by his rules and also tends to place everything in the context of Homer's Odyssey and the lost city of Troy, his life's obsession.

Peter Ackroyd's atmospheric 13th novel begins with a flourish, and sustains this pace. Obermann, a terrifying madman, is no ordinary fanatic. He is an archaeologist for whom the past and all surviving traces of antiquity are his personal possession. History is his romance; this is his romantic obsession, that and his belief that he holds all the answers. Sophia, his new young wife, is also valuable. She is Greek and therefore capable of reading Homer in the original. It is not surprising that Ackroyd - a gentleman scholar and professional writer devoted to the English intellectual tradition he celebrated somewhat magnificently in Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (2002), and who has a passion for England's past, and in particular London's history - should appear to have forsaken his preferred territory. Not really.

It is worth considering that his previous novel, The Lambs of London (2004), was based on the story of Charles and Mary Lamb, the brother and sister team who shared an interest in Shakespeare as well as a history of mental illness. Their charming collaborative volume, Lamb's Tales from Shakespear, which was published in 1807, was followed a year later by their versions of individual episodes from Homer's Odyssey.

And now we have a novel based on a character whose every breath appears to be linked to an episode from Homer. "I have lived that poetry," announces Heinrich to Sophia, "I have believed that poetry. When I was a boy in Furstenberg I was employed in a little grocer's shop. Selling herrings and potato-whisky. That kind of thing. I shall never forget the evening when a drunken man came into the shop. His name was Herman Niederhoffer. He was the son of a Protestant clergyman in Roebel, but had grown unhappy with his lot. He had taken to drink. Yet he had not forgotten his Homer. He recited to me about a hundred lines of the poet, with all their grand cadence. I asked him to recite them over three times, and each time I gave him a glass of whisky."

Ackroyd, an original and dauntingly prolific English writer of free-wheeling imagination, is also blessed with a flair for facts. No writer uses his immense research and ability to absorb information more playfully. He loves stories, digressions, asides, and he pounces on data with a genuine enjoyment that tends to make even his most wayward fictions entertaining, often fascinating, as in English Music (1992), and at times profound, as in his finest novels, The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983) and Hawksmoor (1985). He keeps his scholarship on the lively side of academic. His diverse novels are balanced by - and almost fed by - his considerable achievement as a biographer of TS Eliot, Dickens, Blake, Thomas More, Shakespeare, and not forgetting London itself, as well as shorter studies of Chaucer, Turner and Newton. For all its lightness of touch, this characteristically odd new novel gradually turns into an almost Faustian tale, with sufficient darkness to keep the simmering comedy at bay as a young woman begins to encounter the truth.

APPARENTLY SET IN the 19th century, the narrative follows Obermann and his bewildered young bride from Athens to the place he holds sacred - as he says before she even leaves her father's house, "I cannot wait to bring you to the plain of Troy. To show you the place where Hector and Achilles fought. To show you the palace of Priam. And the walls where the Trojan women watched their warriors in battle with the invader, Agamemnon, and his soldiers."

The narrative draws its structure from the daily work of excavations Obermann has initiated. His team includes Turks who are equally intent on claiming the legacy of Troy and see the Homeric heroes as their ancestors. But Obermann disputes this. "Have I not made this clear to the world? The Turks are Asiatics from the East. The Trojans were Europeans from the North." The work at Troy is rife with tensions that increase with the arrival of scholars from the US and England. All the while Ackroyd continues developing his characterisation of Obermann as an obsessive who has lost all sense of right and wrong. When he takes to referring to one of his aids as Telemachus, yet another of his secrets begins to emerge.

Conversations spin on, and arguments are settled by, references from The Odyssey. The streets of London may have been replaced by the dusty earthen tracks of Troy, but Ackroyd approaches this tale with the wealth of detail that shapes his fiction. Many of the major set-pieces in the narrative echo events in Homer's epic. Sacrifice, ritual, the presence of a blind seer in the form of a French scholar who sees Troy as "a place of death" are also central, as is the evil lure of a cave known for stealing souls and the feeling that the entire story is being overseen by the gods.

Beyond the main plot, that of Obermann's belief in Troy, are also issues such as who actually owns the past and where does history yield to myth, or when does myth become history? By what right can the living presume to interpret the past? At no time does Ackroyd permit the polemic to intrude in what is the story of one man's quest. Yet The Fall of Troy is a moral yarn, with a suitably moral conclusion in which the gods themselves - or at least fate - settle the outcome. Playful but deliberate, Ackroyd never leaves any doubt that even when dealing with human behaviour, it is history that tells the best stories.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

The Fall of Troy By Peter Ackroyd Chatto, 214pp. £16.99