Reading the very fi rst page of Peter Ackroyd’s 1993 novel, The House of Doctor Dee, for the fi rst time, the experienced and attentive reader is quite probably ready to hazard the guess that it houses a narrative about childhood, secrets and forgetfulness. Once the same reader has read the whole novel, s/he should also be able, upon going back to that same page, to discern the signs there of a romance quest that gradually reveals the intimate connections between those three themes, but also reveals that the connective node they share is that of trauma. For this is how the bulk of that fi rst page reads-with a generous helping of ellipses added:

I had heard nothing about [the house] until after [my father’s] death [ . . . ]. The house was in [ . . . ] an area I scarcely knew [ . . . ]. I took the tube [ . . . ] [as] since childhood I have always enjoyed riding under the ground. [ . . . ] Each time the automatic doors close I experience a deeper sense of oblivion-or is it forgetfulness? (1)

The mystery house is, of course, a staple of the Gothic romance, as is its location in an unfamiliar area; meanwhile, the simultaneous reference to childhood joys and things kept secret by parents, as well as to oblivion and forgetfulness related to what is “under the ground,” points in the direction of traumatic events that have been repressed; whereas the question posed by the narrator-is it oblivion or more correctly forgetfulness?—shows us, as it were, that what has been kept in the sewers is starting to spill up onto the streets; the narrator is starting to doubt whether he is in full control of the writing of his own life-script.