Hawksmoor (Penguin Decades) [Paperback]

This is a strange, dark and compelling book. Taking as his inspiration, a poem by Ian Sinclair, Ackroyd has written a tense, noir story about Nicholas Dyer, the creator of seven of London's most unusual churches, after the great fire of London. The book toggles between Dyer's narrative and the twentieth century story of Nicholas Hawksmoor, an old school police detective, who sets out to solve a series of seemingly inexplicable murders linked to the churches in question.

The story is part ghost story, part thriller, part historical novel, part mystical exploration. It is also a hymn to London and the fantastic and unique architecture and history it contains.

It is hard to classify a book such as this, and I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about it. It has unsettled me, unnerved me and made me think. It is not an easy read, but it is a compulsive page turner, and if you love books about London it is definitely one for you.

I came to this book via Iain Sinclair who I came to via JG Ballard. The book was first as I expected: a creepy look at the Hawksmoor's churches with the satanic undertones suggested in Sinclair's Lud Heat. The atmosphere is superb, both in the 18th century parts and '50's parts. There's a clever parallel between Dyer and Hawksmoor suggesting the lingering of unresolved evil. However this book bored me a great deal. It takes ages to get going. It's a short book at just over 200 pages but should have been condensed to a short story. In the end I was glad to have finished it. It does, however, change the way you walk past London churches...

This book was given to me not long after it was published nearly twenty years ago. This does not mean that I am a slow reader, merely that I am easily distracted by other pieces of fiction that come my way. It would be extremely harsh of me to say that my intuition to leave Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor was justified but literary stylistics over a plot that should have absorbed me left me feeling cheated at the novels conclusion.

For all the literary accolades that this book was afforded, in hindsight they seem misplaced. Yes, it is a credit to the skill of Peter Ackroyd that he can maintain a dual narrative in which the same actions are replayed over a two hundred year period (1700's/1980's) and he can use the vernacular, idioms and syntax of the two separate centuries over alternating chapters, but this does not make him a 'virtuoso writer'.

In the classic canon of gothic literature (Poe, Shelly, Hogg, Stevenson...) and modern (King, Herbert, Barker...) one consistent feature of terrorising your audience is the authors taut psychological control over the information which is administered gradually. What prevents Hawksmoor from being a great read as opposed to the `I-cannot-get-sleep-until-I finish-the-last-chapter' tension elicited by Stephen Kings' better horrors is the structural weakness of alternating actions between centuries. By the time we come round to the actions of Sir Nicolas Hawksmoor or Detective Hawksmoor, my interest has waned; that, in a gothic genre, is fatal.

The other cardinal rule of the gothic is that we are fascinated by the central character. Here, we do have character that is truly intriguing , morally repugnant and spiritually suspect in the form of Sir Nic. whose architecture is incredibly sinister (even in daylight.) However, human sacrifices aside, he does not have the power to really chill you. Detective Hawksmoor (the other central protagonist) is simply two-dimensional.

Hawksmoor on the whole is a missed opportunity because the central metaphysical premise to the novel is very powerful and could have evoked more potently the deep-rooted human anxieties of predestination. Hawksmoor, like present day London, can , in turns thrill with the dark history of its past whilst you meander in the pedestrian banality of its present.