BLAKE

As narrator of Peter Ackroyd's work on the tumultuous life and times of William Blake, Ian Whitcomb reads in a slow, clear, nonintrusive style. At the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, London is a hotbed of radical politics and religious sectarianism. The Blake presented is a brilliant, volatile engraver, whose visionary poems and pictures challenge contemporary conventions. Yet when Whitcomb quotes Blake's conversations and, particularly his poems, listeners will find them scarcely distinguishable from the narration. One longs for such passionate discourses and rousing lines to be given contrasting dramatic inflection and pizzazz, not simply read. J.H.L. ©AudioFile, Portland, Maine [Published: MAR/APR 98]