Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd
217 pages
Published 1985
Read from December 8 to December 9
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Seductive,
almost gleeful evil, lustful revulsion at the stink and "corrupcion" of
human existence, shadows and dust and blood -- the tale of a paranoid
architect laying in a symbol and invocation to occult powers in the
churches of London, with the help of a few human sacrifices, and the
parallel tale of duplicates or echoes or metempsychotic rebirths of
those characters, the architect now a detective in the twentieth century
investigating murders mirroring the old sacrifices in the churches
around London. Repulsively beautiful, filled with the fecal lust of a
chaste hypochondriac, Ackroyd's descriptive powers slither and stroke
and foul through the Georgian-set chapters in a wonderful evocation of
period-perfect prose and exquisite characterization. The modern day
chapters aren't as compelling after the first two parallel victims are
dispatched; Hawksmoor the detective has potential as a character but
sags under thematic expectations, shuffling inertly where his
pseudo-historical doppelganger (inspired loosely by architect Nicholas
Hawksmoor) twists and strangles and dominates his narrative, Ackroyd at
the audacious height of his history-glutted powers. Maybe detectives and
murders aren't my favorite genre staples.
The history of
literary speculations around the historical Nicholas Hawksmoor, before
and after this book, is pretty interesting, at least as Wikipedia sets
it out. One early "promoter" of the occult geography of London (perhaps
the one who originated Hawksmoor's position in the myth, though Wiki is
vague about this) was Iain Sinclair, whose poem "Nicholas Hawksmoor: His
Churches" inspired Ackroyd. "Both Sinclair and Ackroyd's ideas in turn
were further developed by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell in their graphic
novel, From Hell," says Wiki, "which speculated that Jack the
Ripper used Hawksmoor's buildings as part of ritual magic, with his
victims as human sacrifice." I haven't read (or seen) From Hell,
but I can see how this book is part of that lineage of ideas. It's neat
to see how the literary milieu of "occult London" arose and developed
over time, to the point where now it (or its variations) feels like a
go-to cliche in, say, steampunk.
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