SOURCE: “Conjurors of Clerkenwell,” in New Statesman & Society, September 3, 1993, p. 39.

In the following review, Clute offers a positive assessment of The House of Doctor Dee.

At first glance, the title of Peter Ackroyd’s seventh novel, and the fourth to be named after a real person, seems to tell all. Indeed, it tells much. The House of Doctor Dee, as one might expect from memories of Hawksmoor, is a tale in which the past haunts the present, in which the London of some centuries ago lays its correspondences on the glass sepulchres of today, and in which a frail modern man seems doomed to fade into a shadow and parody of a dead but more substantial figure. But this is not the whole story.

Around 1990, a young man named Matthew Palmer inherits from his father a house in Clerkenwell. (Ackroyd places the house in a fictional close located...