Hawksmoor is a 1985 novel by English writer Peter Ackroyd. It won Best Novel at the 1985 Whitbread Awards and the Guardian Fiction Prize. It tells the parallel stories of Nicholas Dyer, who builds seven churches in 18th-century London for which he needs human sacrifices, and Nicholas Hawksmoor, detective in the 1980s, who investigates murders committed in the same churches.The edition used for reference in this article is: Peter Ackroyd: Hawksmoor. With an Introduction by Will Self. Penguin Decades 80s, London 2010 Hawksmoor has been praised as Peter Ackroyd's best novel and an example of postmodernism.
Story In the early 18th century, architect Nicholas Dyer is progressing work on several churches in London's East End. He is, however, involved in Satanic practices (something inculcated in him as an orphan), a fact which he must keep secret from all his associates, including his supervisor Sir Christopher Wren. This is all the more challenging since he indulges in human sacrifice as part of the construction of the buildings. Dyer's simmering contempt for Wren is brought closest to the surface in discussions they have concerning rationalism versus Dyer's own carefully disguised brand of mysticism.
In the 20th century, DCS Nicholas Hawksmoor is called in to investigate a bizarre series of murders by strangulation that have occurred in and around the churches designed by Dyer. The murders are all the more mystifying since the murderer appeared to have left no identifying traces, not even fingerprints on the victims' necks.
However the area is stalked by mysterious shadows, and it becomes clear that not only the weight of the investigation, but unseen forces from the past come to bear on Hawksmoor in a powerful, destructive manner.
Historical background
Peter Ackroyd stressed the fact that Hawksmoor is not a historical novel in the strict sense of the word: "I have employed many sources in the preparation of Hawksmoor, but this version of history is my own invention."Peter Ackroyd: "Acknowledgements", p. 271
Nevertheless, Ackroyd uses historical characters, sites and occurrences in his book. Nicholas Dyer, the architect of the seven churches, is modelled on Nicholas Hawksmoor but doesn't share his death date (Dyer disappears in 1715, Hawksmoor died in 1736). As said in the novel, the Commission for Building Fifty New Churches, which had been established by an Act of Parliament in 1711, commissioned Hawksmoor to build six churches, all of which are dealt with in the novel: Christ Church, Spitalfields, St George's, Bloomsbury, St Mary Woolnoth, St George in the East, St Anne's Limehouse, St Alfege Church, Greenwich. The only fictional church in the book is Little St Hugh, venerating the historical Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln.
Hawksmoor was indeed assistant of Sir Christopher Wren, who is shown in the novel, historically correct, as profoundly interested in science and an active member of the Royal Society. Wren studied anatomy through dissection and vivisectionJ.A. Bennett: "The Mathematical Science of Christopher Wren". Cambridge University Press 1982, p.78 so that the dissection of a killed woman by Wren in the novel refers to actual actions by Wren but maybe not on human beings. It is not certain but possible that Christopher Wren visited Stonehenge. The third historical character in the novel is Sir John Vanbrugh.
Historical occurrences Ackroyd refers to are the Great Plague of London of 1665/1666 and the Great Fire of London of 1666. Bedlam was actually not only a lunatic asylum but also an attraction for paying guests in the 18th century. For a penny visitors could look into the patients' cells, view the freaks of the "show of Bethlehem" and laugh at their antics. In 1814 alone, there were 96,000 such visits.
Themes
Much of the novel is concerned with the disconnection between the 20th-century London of DCS Hawksmoor and its past, with Dyer's churches being both banal and mysterious to Hawksmoor. Wren's rationalism has succeeded in Hawksmoor's world, but we see Dyer's mysticism reassert itself in the form of murder and mystery. One critic has argued that Dyer's churches come to stand for the persistence of popular history and culture, in opposition to Wren's devotion to a rational progress driven by power and money.Link, Alex. "'The Capitol of Darknesse': Gothic Spatialities in the London of Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor." Contemporary Literature. 45.3 (2004): 516-37.
Occultism
Nicholas Dyer believes in a syncretistic religion based on an utterly pessimistic view of man and world, represented by London: "In keeping with his Biblical belief that 'it was Cain who built the first City', Dyer leads us through the 'monstrous Pile of London' – 'Nest of Death and Contagion', 'Capital City of the World of Affliction', 'Hive of Noise and Ignorance'."
Mirabilis, Nicholas Dyer's spiritual teacher, is the leader of an underground sect known as "Enthusiasticks". Mirabilis preaches that "Christ was the Serpent who deceiv'd Eve, and in the form of a Serpent entered the Virgin's womb" and that "Sathan is the God of this World and fit to be worshipp'd." Among the sources he merges for his religion are the Ammonites, the Carthaginians, "the Straw Man of our Druides," the Syrian Beel-Zebub, the Assyrians, the Jews, the Cabbala, Joseph of Arimathea, the Cathedral of Bath, the Temple of Moloch, Westminster and Anubis. The sect "sacrificed Boys since it was their Opinion that Humane life, either in desperate sicknesse or in danger of Warre, could not be secured unless a vyrgyn Boy suffered in stead." A four-liner expresses the syncretist nature of Mirabilis's sect:
Dyer develops his own belief in a reference between the pattern his churches form and the realm of evil and otherworldly. The pattern of his churches mirrors the "Proportion of the Seven Orders", i.e., Dyer literally tries to reproduce the pattern of the seven fixed stars that control the planetary spheres, thus hoping to submit to his will the seven planetary demons who control them. The exotic names Ackroyd gives to these demons bring to mind the seven maskim of Babylonian occultism. Due to the principles of sympathetic magic, Dyer reproduces with his churches the pattern of the seven planetary orders, and ensures that the pattern will be effective by concentrating within the septilateral figure the same kind of evil powers the seven fixed stars cast. "In other words, Dyer devises his churches as a huge talisman. This is why he builds them near ancient cemeteries and buries a sacrificial victim under their foundations, for, in his words: "when there are many Persons dead, only being buryed and laid in the Earth, there is an Assembling of Powers"."Susana Onega: "Metafiction and Myth in the Novels of Peter Ackroyd", Camden House 1999, p. 52f.
Dyer believes that the ancients had an understanding of the "laws of harmonious proportions" used by the Universal Architect in the creation of the cosmos. Therefore, he studies ancient treatises on architecture. He builds his seven churches according to these principles and arranges them in a pattern imitating the Pleiades. In the end he disappears in his last church, like Hermes Trismegistus in his pyramid to begin his transmigration from body to body. Dyer undergoes a series of reincarnations both as victim and as murderer: each time he is reborn as a child or tramp, the new reincarnation is subsequently murdered by his "shadow" or dark emanation. In his last, 20th-century reincarnation, Dyer's evil emanation is embodied by the tramp called "The Architect", his good or rational side, by Nicholas Hawksmoor. The text expresses their final unification in the last paragraph of the novel when only one person speaks: What is said is separated by a wide blank on the page, indicating change of narrative level. The duality expressed in the change of narrative voices in the successive chapters is overcome by a first-person narration by somebody who is neither "The Architect" nor Hawksmoor.for the conclusions in this paragraph see: Susana Onega: "Metafiction and Myth in the Novels of Peter Ackroyd", Camden House 1999, p. 55f.
Enlightenment vs. occultism
Central to Hawksmoor is an ongoing debate between those who believe in enlightenment and rationalism and those who believe in occultism. The main protagonists of both sides are Sir Christopher Wren and Nicholas Dyer. "While Dyer argues that man cannot avoid the rage of evil spirits except by participating in evil, Wren and his fellow members of the Royal Society argue that man's reason will one day vanquish 'those wilde inhabitants of False worlds'. Dyer's is the voice of the most despairing (and exulting) anti-intellectualism, a throwback to medieval notions of the necessary primacy of the irrational; Wren's is the civilized voice in which we should like to believe." Detective Hawksmoor begins as a member of the rationalist movement before resembling more and more Nicholas Dyer.
The nature of time
Hawksmoor transports an idea of time that is detrimental to the idea of time as a linearly progressing direction in time. "Ackroyd's aim is [...] to expose the linear character of time [...] for the fabrication that it is, and to propel his readers into a zone of full temporal simultaneity."Will Self: "Introduction", p. vi This is achieved by parallelling numerous events happening in 18th-century and 1980s London thus indicating that Dyer and Hawksmoor experience more than only their own time. A symbol for this idea of a simultaneity of different layers of time is the uroborus:
This feature of Ackroyd's novel has been seen in scholarly research as distinctively postmodern: "One of the features of postmodern novels is to organise narrative time in non-linear fashion and to present the story line as fragmented and disrupted." This problematises reality by questioning scientific laws that governing time as well as social and cultural ideas of time that help to construct the western concept of reality. "There are no rational explanations for the time slips that occur between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries and, in some respects, the novel is a problematisation of that rational thinking that seeks causality and linearity." The reader has to accept Ackroyd's treatment of time in order to understand the novel.Ana Sentov: "The Postmodern Perspective of Time in Peter Ackroyd's "Hawksmoor", relying heavily on Paul Smethurst: "The Postmodern Chronotope" (2000) Facta Universitas, Series: Linguistics and Literature Vol 7, November 2008 http://facta.junis.ni.ac.rs/lal/lal2009/lal2009-10.pdf
Ackroyd himself called his concept of time in Hawksmoor "the perpetual present of the past" which "reemerges in the most unlikely ways."
Literary and philosophical influences
Iain Sinclair's Lud Heat
Peter Ackroyd himself declared in the Acknowledgements that the stimulus for Hawksmoor was Iain Sinclair's poem Lud Heat: "I would like to express my obligation to Iain Sinclair's poem, Lud Heat, which first directed my attention to the stranger characteristics of the London churches." Lud Heat (1975) is subtitled "a book of the dead hamlets". In Book One, "The Muck Rake", Sinclair devotes the first section to "Nicholas Hawksmoor, His Churches".
Sinclair's thesis is that Hawksmoor planned his churches according to a strict "geometry of oppositions" producing a "system of energies, or unit of connection, within the city," similar to those formed by "the old hospitals, the Inns of Courts, the markets, the prisons, the religious houses and the others". Sinclair argues that Hawksmoor arranged Christ Church, St George's in-the-East, and St Anne's, Limehouse, to form a triangle, while St George's, Bloomsbury, and St Alfege's, Greenwich, make up a pentacle star.Sinclair quoted in: Susana Onega: "Metafiction and Myth in the Novels of Peter Ackroyd", Camden House 1999. p. 44