SOURCE: “The Poet Crying in the Wilderness,” in Times Literary Supplement, August 30, 1996, p. 23.

In the following review, Broughton offers a generally favorable assessment of Milton in America, though he notes that it “is not a perfect novel.”

In the unlikely event that he ran out of ideas, Peter Ackroyd would have a number of choices. He could drive a London cab, bewildering his customers with arcane short-cuts and encyclopaedic chat. Or he might make a second fortune designing erudite Virtual Reality tours of Olde Whitechapel, pestilential smells included. Or maybe he would find another metropolis to be his Muse: preferably somewhere with richly clotted streets, a violent past and poor plumbing.

Setting Milton in America is Ackroyd’s joke: at all those poet-of-London clichés, and hence, more indirectly, at his own expense. The novel might just as easily be called Fish out of Water. For John Milton...