Peter Ackroyd. The House Of Doctor Dee. Summary

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Peter Ackroyd. The House of Doctor Dee. Summary Matthew Palmer is a twenty-nine-year-old only child living in London. His parents are estranged, and his mother has a lover, Geoffrey, «the surveyor». On the death of his father Matthew learns that he has inherited a house in Clerkenwell, a section of central London. As the novel opens we see Matthew deciding to occupy the Clerkenwell house. On moving in, however, he begins to disintegrate psychologically as he slowly learns the awful and unbelievable secret of his paternity. Interwoven with this modern story, in alternate chapters, is the fictionalized narrative of Dr. John Dee, who lived from 1527 to 1608, polymath, mathematician, astrologer to Queen Elizabeth, and a professed Hermetic scholar. We encounter Dee at the approximate age of 40, sometime between 1566 and 1570. In telling us his life story, he wrestles with a professional interloper, Edward Kelley, and the devastating death of his wife, Katherine. As the narrative unfolds, we realize that, unbeknownst to him, Matthew Palmer has inherited from his father the house of Dr. Dee. Both characters, Matthew Palmer and John Dee, become obsessed with the past, Dee with recreating an ancient, undiscovered and glorious London; and Palmer, with uncovering clues to his own increasingly disordered mind. In a fascinating way, Ackroyd dramatizes these two quests for historical and psychological knowledge as interpenetrating one another. Although some view the novel as a ghost story, its characters’ influences travel in both temporal directions, suggesting that far from being simply a tale of a haunting, The House of Dr. Dee plays for much higher stakes. This novel explores how space prefigures our temporal experiences, and how this spatial prefiguration is ultimately linguistic. For the psychologically minded, this view of the relation of space, time, and
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