- Paperback: 224 pages
- Publisher: Penguin; New Ed edition (26 Sep 2002)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0140171134
- ISBN-13: 978-0140171136
- Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 12.8 x 1.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 66,280 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Product Description
In the aftermath of the great fire, eighteenth-century London is a city of extremes. Squalor and superstition vie with elegance and reason as brilliant architect, Nicholas Dyer, is commissioned to build seven new churches. They are to stand as beacons of the Enlightenment – but Dyer plans to conceal a dark secret at the heart of each one.
Two hundred and fifty years later, in the same vast metropolis, a series of murders occur on the sites of those same churches. Detective Nicholas Hawksmoor investigates, but the gruesome crimes make no sense to the modern mind...
Combining thriller, ghost story and metaphysical tract, Hawksmoor won the Whitbread Book Award and Guardian Fiction Prize in 1985.
About the Author
Novelist, biographer and poet Peter Ackroyd was born in London on 5 October 1949. He won the duplex Whitbread Novel prize and Guardian Fiction Prize for his novel Hawksmoor in 1988.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
AND SO let us beginne; and, as the Fabrick takes its Shape in front of you, alwaies keep the Structure intirely in Mind as you inscribe it. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
AND SO let us beginne; and, as the Fabrick takes its Shape in front of you, alwaies keep the Structure intirely in Mind as you inscribe it. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
I wandr'd the Dark Streets of London...,
By
This review is from: Hawksmoor (Paperback)
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.
34 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dark and beautifully crafted,
By
This review is from: Hawksmoor (Paperback)
This is a dark and skilfully-woven book that held me in thrall and then ended so abruptly that it felt as if the power had been cut. Hawksmoor was ahead of its time, playfully flaunting literary devices that are almost cinematic and have since become widely used. For instance, the narrative flashes backwards and forwards in time, and strange resonances accumulate until past and future become entwined. Words and phrases leap across centuries, and characters overlap in life and death in a chilling and macabre dance.
Much of the narrative is delivered in first person by Nick Dyer, acolyte of Sir Christopher Wren and practitioner of satanic arts. Ackroyd serves up with relish the foul deeds and alarming inner thoughts of Dyer, whose churches rise up as temples of darkness alongside contemporary works that are designed to celebrate enlightenment, science and engineering. Ackroyd so immersed himself in 17th-century English (he claims to have read over 200 books from that time while researching, or perhaps rehearsing, Hawksmoor) that Dyer's first-person narrative is credible, readable and well-paced. If you are new to Ackroyd, start here. If not, be prepared to find a black and elliptical side to him that might surprise you.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
great atmosphere but boring,
By
This review is from: Hawksmoor (Paperback)
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...
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