| Hawksmoor | |
|---|---|
First edition cover |
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| Author(s) | Peter Ackroyd |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Hamish Hamilton |
| Publication date | September 1985 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| ISBN | 978-0-241-11664-7 |
| OCLC Number | 12500258 |
| Preceded by | The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde |
| Followed by | Chatterton |
Hawksmoor is a 1985 novel by the 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 he needs human sacrifices for, and Nicholas Hawksmoor, detective in the 1980s, who investigates murders committed in these very churches.[1]"Hawksmoor" has been praised as Peter Ackroyd's best novel up to now and an impressive example of postmodernism[2].
Contents |
Set in the early eighteenth 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 twentieth century, DCS Nicholas Hawksmoor is called in to investigate a bizarre series of murders by strangulation which 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.
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."[3] The novel "radically subverts the conventions of historical fiction" due to its idiosyncratic time structure[4].
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 which all are dealt with in the novel:
The only fictional church in the book is Little St Hugh (worshipping 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 vivisection[5] 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.[6] 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 people. For a penny they 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.[7]
Much of the novel is concerned with the disconnect between the twentieth-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.[8]
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"."[9]
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"."[11]
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, twentieth-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.[12]
Central to "Hawksmoor" is an ongoing debate between those who believen 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."[13] Detective Hawksmoor begins as a member of the rationalist movement before resembling more and more Nicholas Dyer.
"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."[14]This is achieved by parallelling numerous events happening in 18th-century's and in 1980's 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 distinctive 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.[16]
Ackroyd himself called his concept of time in "Hawksmoor" "the perpetual present of the past" which "reemerges in the most unlikely ways."[17]
Peter Akroyd himself declared 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."[18] '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.[19]
Ackroyd did not follow Sinclair in really thinking that the churches form a distinctive and powerful pattern. Asked if the churches form a "symbol of freemasonry" he answered: "They don't really form a pattern. I made the pattern up."[20]
Coined by the French [Situationist] [Guy Debord], Psychogeography originally referred to practices intended to expose the "urban geography falsified by the commercial and consumerist imperatives of late capitalism"[21]. Debord undertook what he called [dérive]s (literally 'drifts' across the city) that showed the various layers of place (historical, psychic, physical). For Ackroyd the 'dérive' is more like a "[circumambulation] through time as well as place: a widening [gyre] that exposes the very timelessness of this two-millenia-old city."[22] The motif of the wanderer in the novel (tramps, vagrants, the restless wanderers Nicholas Dyer and Nicholas Hawksmoor) shows the influence of the psychogeographical theory in "Hawksmoor".
Scholars have argued that the influence of William Blake and T. S. Eliot, both authors Ackroyd wrote biographies about, is detectable in "Hawksmoor". "The suggestion that Dyer was "more charmed by Milton's Hell than by his Paradise" and Hawksmoor's perception of his work as "that of rubbing away the grease and detritus which obscured the real picture of the world" echo passages in Blake's 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell' (35, 39)."[23]
"Dyer's obsession with physical corruption - in particular his disgust with sex - echoes the dysphoria of Eliot's most characteristic poems; his evocation of London as the Capital City of the World of Affliction and his scorn for the optimism of the Enlightenment strike an unmistakably Eliotic tone. Women are sluts and prostitutes. There is even a passing reference to hollow men.[24] Clearly Mr. Ackroyd shares Eliot's high regard for the language of the Renaissance and for Elizabethan and Jacobean drama."[25]
"The basic principle at work here derives directly from Eliot's 'The Waste Land', a poem that juxtaposes the past with the present to show the continuity of history. [...] Those who are infected with the Black Death are called "Hollow Men", after the famous poem by Eliot. [...] Dyer's reflection on the quanderies of temporality virtually paraphrases a famous passage from Eliot's 'Four Quartets' (1942) [...]: "What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make an beginning."[26]
"Hawksmoor" is divided into a prologue and two untitled parts of six untitled chapters each. The unevenly numbered chapters are first-person narrations by Nicholas Dyer in the 18tz century-London, the evenly numbered chapters take place in the 1980s and are told by an omniscient narrator, from the perspective of a tour guide through London and the murder victim Thomas Hill (chapter 2), the murder victim Ned (chapter 4) and Nicholas Hawksmoor (chapter 6, 8, 10 and 12).
This clear pattern is deliberately obscured by a "pattern of echo and repetition".[27] There are numerous parallels in characters, actions and descriptions between the chapters taking place in the eighteenth and those taking place in the twentieth century. "They escape any effort at organization and create a mental fusion between past and present."[28] For example the same fragments of popular songs, ballads, and poems are heard in the streets of London in both historical periods.
This structure of repetitions and references underlines the peculiar theory of time the novel transports: "As we go on reading, we find more and more [...] reduplications of names, events, actions, and even identical sentences uttered by characters who live two centuries apart, until we are forced to conclude that, in the novel, nothing progresses in time, that the same events repeat themselves endlessly, and that the same people live and die only in order to be born and to live the same events again and again, eternally caught in what appears to be the ever-revolving wheel of life and death.[29] This interchangeability of characters and the circularity of events is stressed by the device of using the same words to end and to begin adjacent chapters.
One of the most characteristic attribute of "Hawskmoor" is the first-person narration by Nicholas Dyer. Ackroyd here imitates unofficial 18th century English (characterized by capitalization, Frenchified suffixes, irrgular orthography) as can be found in Samuel Pepys's diary.
Ackroyd read for half a year 18th century texts in the British Library[30], "texts about how to cure the gout, by a surgeon. Necromantic texts. I didn’t mind what it was as long as it was the right period." The most important source was Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary: "Whenever I had to write a sentence about, say, someone looking out of the window, then I’d look up ‘window’ in Johnson, and there’d be all sorts of definitions, and phrases with the word in it, and these I also co-opted for the book".[31]
The word "shadow" symbolizes not only Dyer's occult belief system but literally his dark side himself since he later on in the novel appears as a shadow killing people. Dyer admonishes his assistant Walter: "the art of shaddowes you must know well, Walter" because "it is only the Darknesse that can give trew Forme to our Work"[32]. The name Dyer gives his occultism is "Scientia Umbrarum" (shaodowy knowledge)[33] The murder victims all fall prey to an ominous figure called "the shadow" [34].
As symbol for the concept of eternity and overcome transitoriness Ackroyd chose the stone. Dyer becomes an architect after Mirabilis, his Satanic sect leader, prophesied to him:
For Dyer the momument of Stonehenge is an ancient place of occult powers, of a deep connection with a dark past because of its stones:
The stones contain for ever the pain of the workers who erected them, Dyer can feel this and more since human concepts and suffering has eternalized in the stones:
One of Satan's names, Beelzebub, can be translated as "Lord of the Flies". Thus flies and other insects (spiders, lice) are recurrently used as symbols in "Hawksmoor". Already at the very beginning of the novel Dyer advises his assistant Walter to "show how the Lines [of the church plans] necessarily beare upon one another, like the Web which the Spider spins in a Closet" [38], thus associating the churches with an insect. Dyer's pessimistic view of the world is stressed by his view of it as a "dunghill" attracting flies: "I saw the Flies on this Dunghil Earth, and then considered who their Lord might be."[39]. Ironically the occultist Dyer compares the rationalistic members of the Royal Society with flies: "The Company buzzed like Flies above Ordure"[40].
Another animal often associated with Satan and evil is the black cat. Thus a black cat is often heard or seen near the places where the tramp called "The Architect" makes his appearance. It is also associated with Mirabilis and his Satanic sect ("I fell into a sound Sleep, before I did so, I seemed to hear screeching, much like that of a Catte."[41] It is a cat which leads Thomas Hill to the church where he gets strangled.[42]
Critics and scholars have identified "Hawksmoor" as a postmodern novel.[43] Ackroyd uses typical postmodern techniques, such as playfulness, intertextuality, pastiche, metafiction and temporal distortion.
Peter Ackroyd himself does not see "Hawksmoor" as an expressingly postmodern novel but prefers the term "transitional writing":
Ackroyd plays with the genre of the detective story by using the form of the detective novel but changing the premises in such a way that the typical course of events (crime - logical investigation - solution) is impossible. "Suffice it to say that in a detective story whose strange outcome is reincarnation, fiction and history fuse so thoroughly that an abolition of time, space, and person is, one might say, inflicted on the reader."[45] Thus "Hawksmoor" can be called an anti-detective novel:
"Hawksmoor" won two of the most predigious British literary awards: the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Whitbread Novel Award. It was reviewed predominantly positively after publication, among others by:
Although most reviews were positive there were voices which critized "Hawksmoor" as confusing or morally repellent, particularly in sexual terms (Hollinghurst, King, Maddox).[51]
While most critics especially praised Ackroyd's imitation of 18th-century English there were critical voices here, for example Cedric D. Reverand II, who wrote that "Ackroyd's notion of the appropriate style seems at times idiosyncratic and more Jacobean-Mannerist than late senventeenth-early eighteenth century".[52]
"Hawksmoor" is still being praised more than twenty years after its publication and is seen as an important work in Ackroyd's oeuvre. It has become the subject of numerous studies, especially on Postmodernism[53]. Adriana Neagu and Sean Matthews wrote in 2002 that
"Hawksmoor" is praised for his "convincingly 18th-century prose" in the 2006 edition of "The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English"[55] It was chosen by Penguin in 2010 as one of five novels representing the 1980s in their series Penguin Decades.
Peter Ackroyd himself is a harsh critic of his novel:
"The South Bank Show" covered "Hawksmoor" in 1985. Extensive dramatizations from the novel alternated with an interview with the author by Melvyn Bragg. The broadcast was directed by David Thomas, the leading actors were Jack Shepherd as Nicholas Dyer, Derek Newark as Nicholas Hawksmoor, Mick Ford as Walter and Clive Swift as Sir Christopher Wren. [57]