Peter Ackroyd and Julian Barnes write a kind of novel that is
totally rooted in the contemporary meshes of intertextuality. Their
stories take off from a historical position towards an atemporal
locus where present, past and even future cohabit, where characters
from all times discuss the issues that have eternally bothered
humankind. This makes their novels appear partly as biography,
partly as historical novels and, in the end, we gather we are dealing
with autobiography: the attempt to commit our own doubts to
paper so as to dispose of them or view them from a better angle.
Both Ackroyd and Barnes produce fine literature in the process, a
thick web of themes, characters and situations through time and
space, that is wholly in character with the multifaced reality we
encounter daily in the contemporary, post-modern world.
