What an amazing book! Profound, intriguing, emotionally heart-felt, disturbing. Everything you could want out of book. Which is to say - an incredible novel... but not for everyone.Reading HAWKSMOOR heartily rang the area of my aesthetic bells that J.G. Ballard or Steven Millhauser also chime - and I can distinctly remember being dismayed by reviews on Goodreads that dismissed those authors with "unlikeable characters", "too cold", "too British", "too removed" or, in Millhauser's case "more interested in ideas than people". Now, this does not seem to be a problem for *me* as, on the one hand, I know some cold, distant, removed people (a few of them may even be British) and so this writing approach strikes me as true to life - there are all kinds of people in the world. And as for "interested in ideas" - well, yes, novelty for its own ends itself can be a trap (especially in genre fiction) but, in the hands of an able-bodied author... who *wouldn't* be interested in an examination of ideas? So, for some, you *may* not like HAWKSMOOR (even the author considers it something of a flawed work because of his inexperience in writing characters at the time) - and yet I say, *perhaps not*, because the authorial investigation of the two main characters was one of the things I personally loved about this book!Here, too, a word about genre. HAWKSMOOR is a crime novel that is more about the murderer than the murders, a detective novel that is more about the Detective than the process of detection, a mystery story that is less interested in solving a mystery than it is about expounding on "mystery", an historical novel that is a-historical and, it could be argued, a horror story that utilizes some standard tropes of the genre (primitive demonology, occult architecture, human sacrifice, the mutability of time) but not in any of the usual, mechanical ways (no chants, no tentacled things reaching through holes in the air, no master plan to birth the Anti-Christ). This is the kind of book "postmodernism" was invented for!The plot is fairly simple: we follow parallel strands of narrative taking place in London - one in the 17th Century, as Nicholas Dyer, architect under Christopher Wren, plots his building and refurbishing of London's great churches after the two-fisted historical sucker-punch of the Plague and the Great Fire has nearly scoured the map clean. Dyer has a very particular worldview, heavily informed by arcane knowledge of the past and occult philosophy, as well as his harrowing early life as an orphan in the squalid streets - he is a calculating but emotionally unbalanced man, scheming, paranoid and very intelligent - and he means to make his mark on London and history itself through his Great Work. Meanwhile, in 1980s London, DSI Nicholas Hawksmoor is set to the task of solving a series of murders taking place on the grounds of these selfsame churches. Hawksmoor is a rational, controlled man as befits a detective - he could be seen as the end result of the "Sherlock Holmes" character: a man who sees patterns in everything and is adept at separating useless information from worthwhile data. But then why is he having so much trouble with these murders?Beyond the basic plot, though, HAWKSMOOR is a fascinating and deep interrogation of rationality and superstition, of humanity and science, how one lives one's life by a belief system and what happens when that system finds itself under assault.If all that sounds intriguing, read this book. There are echoes of the recent TV show TRUE DETECTIVE here and Alan Moore built upon some of the ideas from HAWKSMOOR in his brilliant work about the Jack The Ripper murders, From Hell, which is why I first added this to my reading list decades ago (Gull, in FROM HELL, could be seen as taking advantage of Dyer's groundwork). I'm glad I did. And now, into the spoiler zone and some more in depth analysis for those who have read the book:(view spoiler)[Ackroyd's use of an Olde-English writing style does a marvelous job of not only capturing a voice and the time period, but also of resonating with the material and its concerns - the capitalizations and occasional antiquated word or term reminding us how powerful language is and yet how easily it falls aside under the sway of history ("Words must be pluckt from Obscurity and nourished with Care, improved with Art and corrected with Application. Labour and Time are the Instruments in the perfection of all Work" says Dyer). No mere po-mo affectation, this!What impressed me was how sympathetic Dyer is as a character. A poor wretch, a smart boy born into terrible circumstances who rises by a combination of luck, cunning, intelligence and perseverance, yet driven by a belief system that puts him at odds with his own time. And even this belief system, atavistic and superstitious as it is, holds some appealing truths - not just the sour reflections on corrupt humanity (Dyer can not bring himself to believe in mankind, and thinks they are ruled only by profound terror, a view supported by the cesspit around him and mirrored in Bedlam - and given the scenes of Modern London we are also shown, not so squalid but still as inhuman for the mentally ill and those made lonely by "civilization", we understand Hawksmoor's emotional anomie as well) but also canny reflections on rationality's propensity to demystify and reduce, to atomize and disenfranchise (well shown in the dialogue at the playhouse). We find ourselves questioning Wren's assurance that there is a difference between "phrensies and inspirations" - from our personal experience if nothing else. In this sense, Dyer is fascinating as an occupant of a particular moment in history, as the new system begins to uproot the old - yet the implications of the "new" are just as terrifying, in different ways, than the barbaric "old".But, in the end, Dyer is also a monster, murdering men and children (powerful sequences sketching the varied vice-ridden inhabitants and criminals of London brought to mind the police line-up opening of Algren's The Man With the Golden Arm of all things, as well as contrasting the viciousness, barbarity and general abuse with Dyer's methodical, ritualized murder), biliously mocking the beginnings of our scientific age (the scene of Wren's speech to the Royal Society - with Dyer's sarcastic, sinister asides - is also excellent) and yet forced to hide his monumental works in plain sight and guard their secrets jealously and murderously (even, as it turns out, mistakenly). His grand philosophy is informed and poisoned by his own personal history, motivated by fear, paranoia and awful example. And this depth of character is also helped by the resonance and echoes to be found in the victims - the young boy who builds model cathedrals, the harrowing history of a poor man's descent into mental illness (his social incapacity seen also in Dyer) and homelessness.I felt the origin of Dyer's belief system, his being taken in from the awful street-life by the "Enthusiastiks" (who strike me as learned Decadents/Hellfire Club types, although this is cannily left to the imagination) and tutored in a schismatic, esoteric thought that builds on his own naturally cynical view of humanity (given his experiences, who could blame him?) was quite well done. Rarely has the psychology of the sinister character that motivates plots like these been so well developed. On the other hand (and in retrospect rightly so) Hawksmoor starts out as a cold, mechanical cypher, slowly unraveling in the narrative before us as he questions the subjectivity of reality. And why "rightly so"?It seems that applying terms like protagonist and antagonist to a book like HAWKSMOOR is near-useless. The doubling and twinning of Dyer (an apt name, in retrospect) and Hawksmoor that builds throughout the book is subtle, deep and amazingly deft ("'He's cunning, though.' Then he pointed to his own head. 'He's very cunning'"). The repetition (plotting of blueprints and building of models shaping space to human intent, a figure is seen falling across the sky), the echoes (a compass lost is found again, listeners to popular music keeping time in storefronts, two landladies, two Walters), the turns of phrases and subtle indications of malleable time (Hawksmoor just cannot find the famed Meridian, even when directed to it, "the timing" is the major problem in examining the crime scenes, time and geography are frequently blurred, smudged and distorted under the monuments' influences - or is that just the nature of time and the human mind?) all seem to point towards success in Dyer's obscure plans ("I have built an everlasting Order, which I may run through laughing: no one can catch me now.") but... to what end? The framing of that quote seems to imply that the desire (despite all the profound talk) is to escape the absolute that is Death, a basic human motivation. And does Dyer succeed?There are no solid answers given to almost any of the novel's questions (frustrating for some, I imagine). One could argue that in essence what Dyer has achieved is to have metaphorically placed a mirror in time: on one side is over-emotional Dyer, fighting his arcane war against rationality as he rages, plots, murders and succumbs to paranoia while achieving his goal - and his inverted reflection centuries later is Hawksmoor, the stolid, reliable, rational and emotionally disconnected man who eventually unravels under the weight of a mystery that doesn't make sense, and which causes him to question the entire foundation of his worldview, to wonder whether all the patterns he sees are parts of a larger scheme or merely the human mind sifting reassuring order from chaos (itself merely a hard-wired animal survival technique and not indicative of any larger "truth"). One could phrase this in numerous clunky ways - Hawksmoor is Dyer "reincarnated" or that Dyer "possesses" Hawksmoor - but these are reductive genre terms and don't do justice to the intense and evocative writing. My own take is the visual one I presented - Dyer and Hawksmoor are the same person, a continuum or life-line split halfway along its length, each side reflecting an inverted vision of the other.So, who is the murderer in modern London? Again, in clunky genre terms we might tick off the usual suspects: "an unknown killer", "an unknown killer possessed by Dyer", "Dyer himself, moving through time", "Dyer himself in the past, his actions on his victims echoing in modern time through some arcane temporal power", "some evil force conjured by Dyer's action working in the present" - but none of these answers are satisfying and again the author does such a good job of making these narrative concepts moot that I can't help but feel the answer is contained in my given conception - the reason why Hawksmoor can't solve the murder, the reason it makes no sense is because HE is the murderer, acting unconsciously (thus reinvigorating an old noir trope without resorting to the predictable amnesia card - although, as I said, the actual "how" of it seems moot) - at least in the sense that he IS Dyer inverted.And so does Dyer's plan succeed? Yes and no. On a large scale, yes, he has created his churches and they are sunk deep into the history and fabric of London like monumental stone sentinels around which the temporal currents of history crash, ebb and churn, never changing in themselves but deforming the flow of life and events. Elaborating from Alan Moore's conception in FROM HELL, Dyer can be seen to have magically, symbolically "locked" the heart of London into place as a vast Pitte, a frozen point in time, leaking corruption into the city and the world (I mention FROM HELL because I felt Moore's point in that work was not just that Gull had merely succeeded in killing some women and attaining his personal "enlightenment" from the power released, but that he had also succeeded in binding, in the occult sense, the symbolic concept of "women" to this fearsome invention of the "serial killer," codifying it into the culture of the 20th Century as an awful, real-world bogeyman, the manifestation of his own and his culture's misogyny let loose to threaten and terrorize as it echoes through time).But on the human scale - no Dyer does not succeed in cheating death by dodging through a hole in time ("no one can catch me now") - instead, he plunges through the metaphorical mirror and lives the awful life of Hawksmoor - himself - from the heights of respect and notoriety down into despair of failure and loneliness and then, finally, terminating by facing his own reflection in his church - and thus there is nowhere to go, there is only solitude and loneliness because there is only "yourself" and your actions... after all. (hide spoiler)]
"This mundus tenebrosus, this shaddowy world of Mankind, is sunk into Night; there is not a Field without its Spirits, nor a City without its Daemons, and the Lunaticks speak Prophesies while the Wise men fall into the Pitte. We are all in the Dark, one with another. And, as the Inke stains the Paper on which it is spilt and slowly spreads to Blot out the Characters, so the Contagion of darkness and malefaction grows apace until all becomes unrecognizable."In 1711, Nicholas Dyer is commissioned to design seven new churches in London. Orphaned when his parents died from Plague, the young Nicholas is taken up by the mysterious Mirabilis. Dyer's religion is demonic and bloody (to Mirabilis, he first introduces himself as 'Faustus'). Dyer believes that God wants blood and that each of his seven churches must have a human sacrifice.The novel alternates between 18th century London and 20th century London. The past seems to spill into the present and the chapters slide easily and seamlessly between the past and the present.The 20th century Hawksmoor is a detective investigating a series of murders around London. Each murder corresponds to an 18th century one. All are committed within the grounds of one of the seven new churches. Every main character in the 20th century narrative has his or her 'twin' in the 18th century thread. Thus Dyer's assistant is Walter Pyne, and Hawksmoor's is Sgt Walter Payne. Dyer's near neighbour is Mrs Best; Hawksmoor's is Mrs West. Thomas Hill is both the son of the mason who falls to his death at Spitalfields after the church was built there, and also the first victim of the serial killer in the 20th century narrative.Finally, Hawksmoor begins to crack up. Unable to solve the case, he's taken off it. The personalities of Dyer and Hawksmoor seem to merge in a world where time is of no account and fluid. They come together at last in the last and finest of the churches, Little St Hugh, a place that does not exist, where the two identities finally merge.This is a disturbing, dense novel about the impact of the past upon the present and upon the nature of time itself. Most of all, perhaps, it's a novel about alienation - from the self, and from society. [Sept 2005]
What do You think about Hawksmoor (1993)?
Though this is a fairly short book at 217 pages, it is not an easy read, in part because the historical chapters are written in olde English which takes some getting used to. When I reached part two, I decided to stop and begin reading the book over again: I found I was understanding the language a bit better but I also realized there were coincidences across time to which I should be paying closer attention. I also wanted to acquaint myself with the actual historical events of the time period before continuing.The story begins in the early 18th century when architect, Nicholas Dyer, has been commissioned to build seven new churches in London, a city devastated by the Great Plague of 1665 followed by the Great Fire of London in 1666. Note that Peter Ackroyd has played with the name of the actual architect, Nicholas Hawksmoor, and increased the number of churches he designed by one. Dyer is a practitioner of the ancient dark arts and includes symbols of his religion in his designs while concealing a sacrificial murder at each as well. "My churches will indure, I reflected. I have liv'd long enough for others, like the Dog in the Wheel, and it is now the Season to begin for myself: I cannot change that Thing call'd Time, but I can alter its Posture and, as Boys do turn a looking-glass against the Sunne, so I will dazzle you all."The chapters alternate between the past and modern day London (1985) where a series of murders are occuring at each of Dyer's churches which are under investigation by senior police officer, Nicholas Hawksmoor. Names, words and objects from the past echo in the present in a fascinating way, while issues about 'time' and 'dust' are repetitive threads. The reader watches in horror as both Nicholas Dyer and Nicholas Hawksmoor unravel before our eyes as they pursue their life missions. This is a strange, complex book but worth reading.
—Bam
I feel as though I ought to like Hawksmoor more than I actually did. Perhaps if I'd read more about it first and seen the volume of praise for it as a post-modern novel, I would have come in with a different expectation - but the truth of it is, I am not a fan of post-modernism, and I have yet to read a post-modern work that really appealed to me.Half of Hawksmoor, it must be said, is fucking brilliant. Peter Ackroyd chose to write in a full 18th century style, and the work he put into that style is incredible. The language alone forces you into a different headspace and makes the protagonist of that era, Nicolas Dyer, one of the most fully realized and alive literary characters I've ever encountered. Dyer is - in a word - CREEPY. In his time, he is plotting to build seven churches to represent his diabolical visions, and while I've never been creeped out by a plot of that kind before, this one made my skin crawl.Unfortunately, the other half of Hawskmoor simply left me cold, and skimming the pages. In the "future," the events of Dyer's time are repeating, and I understand full well that Ackroyd is making a point about time and space here, but his point overshadows his writing in the "modern" pieces. The trouble is that the 18th century sections are so alive and realized that it leaves the modern sections feeling positively bland. Detective Hawksmoor is barely even a character, more just a way for the author to show the repetition of time. If we didn't have the Dyer sections to compare it to, it wouldn't be so bad, but alas. I suspect I would recommend this if, for nothing else, the sections on Nicolas Dyer. For a fan of language, the sentences alone are a real treat, and Ackroyd has brought the 18th century to life in a way that very few authors are capable of. Just don't go in, as I did, expecting any actual detection or mystery to occur.
—Sarah
SUMMARY:Inspector Morse meets the Time Travellers Wife with a hint of Grand Designs. But without the actual in-plot benefits of inexplicable time travel, a love interest or Kevin McCloud. THE LONG-WINDED VERSION:Ah London, the Big Smoke, the Great Wen, the sunken, scum-ridden, grease-spotted, pitted underbelly of the Old World. New York is referred to as the Big Apple, which implies shiny, fresh-ripened juiciness. If London was a fruit it would probably be that odd-looking stinky one that comes from Cambodia, whatsitcalled? Ah the Durian (thanks Google).Peter Ackroyd knows a lot about London and all of his books revolve around creating diverting Poe-esque tales of ghostly mystery and imagination. Stories which he then dresses with his frankly encyclopaedic knowledge of London's social history and development. There's not a nook, cranny, wient or alley which Ackroyd doesn't know about and that is part of the joy of his writing. So, two intertwining tale of black magic, murder and devilment set amongst the hallowed cloisters of the greatest churches in London. Evil from the past echoes through the ages (frequently in the format of ye-oldy-worldy English) and the hidden signs and symbols of architect Nicholas Dyer act as a conduit to the future and Detective Nick Hawksmoor who is somewhere in the 20th century trying to clean up modern murders in the same churches. Dyer is based on the 17th century Nicholas Hawksmoor who was a real chap and as the go-to-guy behind Christopher Wren's work was commissioned in 1711 to design 6 churches; St Alfeges, Greenwich; St Georges, Bloomsbury; St Mary Woolnoth, St Georges East Wapping; St Annes at Limehouse and most famously, Christchurch Spitalfields. Ackroyd has obviously performed a historical switcheroo by naming his modern day protagonist and detective, Nicholas Hawksmoor thus continuing that "echoes through eternity theme". Uh huh, I like what you did there. Obviously there is no real evidence that Hawksmoor was a devil worshipper who cunningly hid satanic squigglings in these churches, however that will not stop a bunch of overwrought historical scholars suggesting such things and cheerfully it was this nonsense which inspired Ackroyd to write what is, in my opinion, a damn fine read. *Applause* for Mr Ackroyd.
—Shovelmonkey1
