The Fall of Troy
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
In The Fall of Troy, acclaimed novelist and historian Peter Ackroyd creates a fascinating narrative that follows an archaeologist's obsession with finding the ruins of Troy, depicting the blurred line between truth and deception.Obermann, an acclaimed German scholar, fervently believes that his discovery of the ancient ruins of Troy will prove that the heroes of the Iliad, a work he has cherished all his life, actually existed. But Sophia, Obermann's young Greek wife, has her suspicions about his motivations — suspicions that only increase when she finds a cache of artifacts that her husband has hidden, and when a more skeptical archaeologist dies from a mysterious fever. With exquisite detail, Ackroyd again demonstrates his ability to evoke time and place, creating a brilliantly told story of heroes and scoundrels, human aspirations and follies, and the temptation to shape the truth to fit a passionately held belief.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Whitbread and Guardian Fiction Prize winner Ackroyd has made a career out of charting London's history, most recently in The Lambs of London and Shakespeare: The Biography. Here he turns to old Troy. In telegram- and steamboat-era Athens, the Greek Sophia Chrysanthis hastily weds German archeologist Johann Ludwig Heinrich Julius Obermann, mainly out of desire for an Indiana Jones style adventure. Sophia quickly finds, however, that life with Johann approximates the Trojan excavation site (outside the Turkish village of Hissarlik) that Johann mines so lovingly: one jaw-dropping discovery follows another. But while Johann interprets the antiquities he finds using the Iliad, Sophia is left without a guide to her enigmatic husband's true self. Unfortunately, although her predicament effectively mirrors the plight of Helen of Troy, and although the riddle of Johann's identity is the very reflection of the Trojan horse's portentousness, Sophia spends the greater part of the novel wincing and rationalizing. And a book's worth of calculation is undone at the end when Ackroyd raises hallowed dust, but clouds the issues at hand.
