‘Troy’ is an odyssey of archaeologist’s life

At 58, Peter Ackroyd is one of those erudite English word machines whose career you can call capacious and still feel as if you’re understating things.

His nearly 30 books for adults -- there are others for children -- include prize-winning novels, full-dress literary biographies and nonfiction treatments that include transvestism as well as his beloved London. There are, of course, collections of poetry and criticism, as well as a remarkable life of Thomas More. History has been the mortar that binds the Ackroyd edifice together, though he likes to moisten his facts with a knowing sort of irreverence until they’re malleable enough to yield to the trowel of his prose. It’s a thinking person’s playfulness, the product of deep research and a certain distaste for piety, which is quite different from impiety.

Thus, “The Fall of Troy,” Ackroyd’s 13th novel, an oddly engaging -- sometimes just odd -- little story. The book is a slyly manipulated gloss on the most famous incident in the incredibly eventful life of Heinrich Schliemann, the controversial 19th century swindler and fabulist-turned-archaeologist who claimed to have discovered Homer’s Troy. Schliemann, the son of a German pastor who lost his pulpit for misappropriating church funds, was a baffling figure, a barely educated grocer’s apprentice who claimed to have acquired a life-long love of Homer’s “Iliad” by listening to a drunken customer declaim the story in his master’s shop.

Eventually, Schliemann made his way to the California gold fields, where he made a fortune from a bank that bought and sold gold dust. He absconded on his partner and settled in St. Petersburg, where he took a Russian wife and made a truly great fortune profiteering in the Crimean War. He returned to the U.S. and lied about his immigration status to obtain an Indiana divorce in absentia. Wealthy and with an unshakable faith in Homer’s historical veracity, Schliemann set out to prove that the events in the “Iliad” and “Odyssey” actually occurred. In quick succession he claimed to have found and excavated Ithaca, Troy and Mycenae.

Schliemann’s idealism and his glancing relationship with the truth meshed conveniently, and he stole various artifacts, salted his digs with others and may even have commissioned forgeries, including the famed “mask of Agamemnon” he claimed to have “discovered” at Mycenae. If the storied “treasure of Priam” that he purportedly uncovered at Troy actually came from the site, it predated Homer’s war by at least 1,000 years. On the other hand, Schliemann, who began as little more than a treasure hunter and vandal, was using state-of-the-art methods by the time he made his third expedition to Troy and used his wealth to publish and publicize the results of his digs, helping to create what we now regard as scientific archaeology.

In Ackroyd’s intricately plotted little tale, Schliemann becomes the character Heinrich Obermann, and we join his story when he travels to Athens -- as Schliemann did -- to acquire a young Greek wife, Sophia, in an arranged marriage. She shares her new husband’s fervor for Homer, a passion that leads him to declaim: “Every day on Troy is a holy day. It is a sacred place. A shrine. . . . It was here that Asia and Europe, East and West, first met in conflict. It is here that literature began. Does that not make it holy?”

Earlier, as they approach the Anatolian coast, Obermann instructs his bride, “Do you see there, Sophia, that bay? That is where the princess Hesione was exposed to the attacks of the sea-monster sent by Neptune. Do you see the promontory of black rock? That is where Hercules saved her. There is the trench he built. . . . “

“You believe these stories, Heinrich?”

“There is truth to them. We live in a hard age. An age of iron. We need these stories. We should give thanks that they survive.”

(We should also ask why a character so steeped in Homeric lore that he’s just taken a Greek wife suddenly slips into Latinate usage, but only the author can answer that one -- and what the hell, anyway.)

Like Schliemann, Obermann has a somewhat sinister cast to his project -- a desire to find physical evidence for racialist theories that the Greeks and Trojans were descended from superior Northern European warrior stock that pushed into Greece and Anatolia to vanquish the “Asiatic” inhabitants.

Sophia soon discovers that her husband is more than an obsessed idealist and that his elastic approach to scientific facts extends to his biography. More alarming, others who obstruct his work or contradict his views seem to come to bad ends. Is it chance, the intercession of the Greek gods at whose altars her husband has taken to praying in the old way, or something more prosaic and deadly?

Gradually, Sophia begins -- almost accidentally and unwillingly -- to uncover the secret and unsavory past of her wealthy new husband and circumstances quickly -- a trifle too quickly and conveniently -- build to an appropriately Grecian, which is to say, tragic end.

Ackroyd has a good deal of layered fun with all this and some of it extends to the dialogue through which much of the story unfolds. Much of it is self-consciously melodramatic in the 19th century mode. Obermann’s lines often read as if in poor imitation of translation. It could be an irritating authorial mistake -- unless you’ve done enough research to know that the historic Schliemann kept himself fluent in the 13 languages he spoke by always keeping his diary in the language of the country in which he was staying. Keep that in mind and passages like this become interesting:

“When did you meet the Russian woman?” Sophia suddenly asked him.

“Many years ago. She was fierce and arrogant. I knew nothing.”

“Where did you find her?”

“In a small mining town in the east of the country. I had been speculating in Russian gold. Why these questions, Sophia? It is a long time ago.”

“I am interested in the first Mrs. Obermann.”

“You have nothing in common with her but the name.”

“She was childless?”

“ ‘Have I not said so?’ He glanced at her. ‘But you will not remain childless for long. When we have left this place, we will raise a fat and healthy family!’ ”

“For some reason the prospect appalled her. . . .”

For some reason?

Sophia’s next question has to do with whether or not Obermann’s father really poisoned his mother.

Or consider this: after Sophia has passed the night with the mysterious Greek couple who hide artifacts -- and, as she ultimately discovers, a good deal else -- for her husband:

“ ‘Tell me about the Skopeli,’ she said.

“They work for me.”

“I thought them mysterious.”

“The Phrygian is secretive by nature. Even when he has no secret worth speaking of.”

“They have a dancing goat.”

“ ‘A mad animal. I do not approve of madness.’ And he said no more upon the subject.”

“The Fall of Troy” is a sly, witty and oddly engaging novel that meditates on literature and idealism and the uses and misuses of both. It takes full and knowing advantage of the archaeological metaphor to suggest how human experience can reveal itself to the discerning, one stratum at a time.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com