SOURCE: “Pastures New,” in New Statesman, September 27, 1996, p. 60.

In the following review, Clute offers a tempered assessment of Milton in America, which, he concludes, “is a hard book to judge.”

It is his most presumptuous act of possession to date, Peter Ackroyd has already taken on five historical figures in his fiction, including Doctor Dee, Nicholas Hawksmoor, Dan Leno and Oscar Wilde. The stories he tells of them tend to invoke metaphors of possession, with buried aspects of the protagonists’ selves signalling desperately for recognition. Now it is the turn of John Milton, who is too formidable a figure to mock with Shadows from the back pages of Carl Jung—it would seem.

Milton in America does indeed seem to chart a new course. It is an Alternate History tale though it takes small advantage of a mode whose popularity in the 1990s marks one creative response to...