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Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd
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Hawksmoor (original 1985; edition 1993)

by Peter Ackroyd

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingConversations / Mentions
1,857429,005 (3.53)1 / 144
In 18th-century London, squalor vies with elegance as architect Nicholas Dyer is commissioned to build new churches in the aftermath of the Great Fire. CID Detective Hawksmoor, 250 years later, investigates a series of murders that have occurred on the sites of certain 18th-century London churches.
Member:kewing
Title:Hawksmoor
Authors:Peter Ackroyd
Info:Penguin Books Ltd (1993), Paperback, 224 pages
Collections:Your library
Rating:***
Tags:british, London, 18th century

Work Information

Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd (1985)

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» See also 144 mentions

Showing 1-5 of 41 (next | show all)
This is a terrible book. I have stared at its 270 pages without actually being able to read them. It's just so abysmally written than I could not grasp it at all. My mind would just slip after a sentence or two, and eventually I would notice that my eyes had just moved over another page full of words without knowing what they contain.

What I got from this book: there are two blokes named Nicholas, one is a dull satanist who builds churches with a secret ingredient in the 1710s, and one who investigates murders in those churches in the 1980s. In the end of the book, they merge into one single space-time paradoxical freak. That's all that happens. Now you know it all. Don't bother reading the book. ( )
  adastra | Jan 15, 2024 |
"Destruction is like a snow-ball rolled down a Hill, for its Bulk encreases by its own swiftness and thus Disorder spreads."

The novel’s main protagonist, Nick Dyer, ( partly based on the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor who worked alongside Sir Christopher Wren), is a follower of a Satanic cult who consecrates his churches with human sacrifices. Hawksmoor is a 1980's detective investigating a series of murders that mirror those committed in the name of Dyer’s art.

This is my third novel by the author having previously read 'The Lambs of London' and 'The House of Doctor Dee' so in some respects I knew what to expect. The novel will be based on a real historical character but mixed with a modern fictional character, the real world colliding with the fictitious world. The setting for the novel will be London but it will be a far darker and gloomier London than what the tourist of today is going to see with its Tudor smells and noises. Ackroyd’s narrative will shift between the early 18th century and the 1980s, as does the idiom. In all these respects this book doesn't disappoint. ( )
  PilgrimJess | Dec 8, 2023 |
Difficult to do justice to this complex book with so many parallels in its interwoven narrative that switches between the early 18th century and late twentieth. The narrative of Nicholas Dyer, based on the real life Nicholas Hawksmoor - whose name Ackroyd gives instead to his 20th century detective - is an impressive recreation of the thought processes and even the style of expression, down to the eccentric spelling and frequent capital letters, of a deeply sinister character whose nihilism and devil worship has been formed from the trauma of witnessing his parents' deaths in the plague and from the education given subsequently by a cult leader who took him in off the streets. Dyer secretly adds elements to the seven churches he designs, to embody the power of his negative religious beliefs and to ensure that the churches form an everlasting nexus of murder and degradation, sanctifying each with a human sacrifice, but as time goes on, becomes increasingly paranoid that others are onto him, with disastrous results for two of his work colleagues. Centuries later, it seems that someone is repeating the human sacrifices with many parallels and Hawksmoor unravels as he fails to solve the killings.

I like most the 18th century parts of the novel. I couldn't take to Hawksmoor, finding him a cipher rather than a character and found the ending baffling.
( )
  kitsune_reader | Nov 23, 2023 |
This novel is in the form of two plot-poor stories separated in time. One is that of the fictional architect, Nicholas Dyer, who was both responsible for designing seven London East End Queen Anne churches and a serial killer with a peculiar mystic religion of his own, and the other is a modern doppelgänger-like detective named Nicholas Hawksmoor who is investigating a series of murders occurring at these same churches. The novel alternates between these narratives and progresses with the physical and mental deterioration of both characters. The writing is darkly atmospheric, cynical, horrific and dream-like. It is handled very well with Dyer’s dialogue apparently modeled on that of Samuel Pepys. I found the novel riveting, but ultimately somewhat unsatisfying since it is not an actual detective story, and the resolution seemed vague. In a 1989 interview in Bomb magazine, as quoted in the Wikipedia article, the author said, The modern sections are weak, not in terms of language, but weak in terms of those old-fashioned characteristics of plot, action, character, story.

I looked up these churches and they are quite impressive massive-appearing structures. I presume that they were not built using human sacrifice. The churches were actually designed by an architect named Nicholas Hawksmoor. One of the churches in the novel, Little St. Hugh, is fictional, although Little Saint Hugh was an actual 9-year-old boy whose murder in 1255 was called a ritual child murder and attributed to the Jews by King Henry III and the Bishop of Lincoln. ( )
  markm2315 | Jul 1, 2023 |
Very very very weird. Too weird for me I guess, even though the writing was pretty cool. Honestly I didn’t understand much of what was going on. ( )
  steve02476 | Jan 3, 2023 |
Showing 1-5 of 41 (next | show all)
Hawksmoor speaks the words of romantic duality, and is in a number of ways a double book. It consists of two alternating narratives, one of which is set in the 18th century and the other in the present, with the earlier delivered in the first person. Each of the two principal actors glimpses his double in passing, as a reflection in a glass, and each stands to the other in the same relation – a relation which presupposes, as in many other Gothic texts, some sort of metempsychosis or rebirth. Both of these men are disturbed or mad. Nicholas Dyer is imagined as the builder of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s churches in the East End of London: the enlightened edifices of a rational Christianity are thereby ascribed to a devil-worshipper, while the name ‘Hawksmoor’ is assigned to the Detective Chief Superintendent who, in the later narrative, frets himself into a delirium over a series of stranglings which take place in the vicinity of the churches. The later crimes duplicate those committed by Dyer, who has wished to baptise his churches with the blood of young victims.
 
''Hawksmoor'' is a witty and macabre work of the imagination, intricately plotted, obsessive in its much-reiterated concerns with mankind's fallen nature. It is less a novel in the conventional sense of the word (in which, for instance, human relationships and their development are of central importance) than a highly idiosyncratic treatise, or testament, on the subject of evil.
 

» Add other authors (12 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Peter Ackroydprimary authorall editionscalculated
Silcox, PaulaCover artistsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Асланян, АннаTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed

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Epigraph
Thus in 1711, the ninth year of the reign of Queen Anne, an Act of Parliament was passed to erect seven new Parish Churches in the Cities of London and Westminster, which commission was delivered to Her Majesty's Office of Works in Scotland Yard. And the time when Nicholas Dyer, architect, began to construct a model of the first church. His colleagues would have employed a skilled joiner to complete such a task, but Dyer preferred to work with his own hands, carving square windows in miniature and cutting steps out of the clean deal: each element could be removed or taken to pieces, so that those of an enquiring temper were able to peer into the model and see the placing of its constituent parts. Dyer took his scale from the plans he had already drawn up, and, as always, he used a small knife with a piece of frayed rope wrapped around its ivory handle. For three weeks he labored over this wooden prototype and, as by stages he fitted the spire upon the tower, we may imagine the church itself rising in Spitalfields. But there were six other churches to be built also, and once again the architect took his short brass rule, his pair of compasses, and the thick paper which he used for his draughts. Dyer worked swiftly with only his assistant, Walter Pyne, for company while, on the other side of the great city, the masons shouted to each other as they hewed out of the rough stone the vision of the architect. This is the vision we still see and yet now, for a moment, there is only his heavy breathing as he bends over his papers and the noise of the fire which suddenly flares up and throws deep shadows across the room.
Dedication
For Giles Gordon
First words
And so let us beginne; and, as the Fabrick takes shape in front of you, alwaies keep the Structure intirely in Mind as you inscribe it.
Quotations
My Inke is very bad: it is thick at the bottom, but thin and waterish at the Top, so that I must write according as I dip my Pen. These Memories become meer shortened Phrases, dark at their Beginning but growing faint towards their End and each separated so, one from another, that I am not all of a peece. Here laying beside me is my convex Minor, which I use for the Art of Perspecktive, and in my Despair I look upon my sell; but when I take it up I see that my right Hand seems bigger than my Head and that my Eyes are but glassy Orbs: there are Objects swimming at the Circumference of the Glass and here I glimpse distended a doaths chest beneath the Window, with the blew damask Curtains blowing above it, a mahogany Buroe beside the Wall and there the Corner of my Bed with its blankets and bolster; there is my Elbow-chair, its Reflection curved beneath my own as I hold the Minor, and next to it my side-board Table with a brass Tea-Kettle, lamp and stand. As my Visual rays receive from the Convex superficies a curved Light, these real Things become the surface of a Dream: my Eyes meet my Eyes but they are not my Eyes, and I see my Mouth opening as if to make a screaming Sound. Now it has grown Darke, and the Minor shows only the dusky Light as it is reflected on the left side of my Face. But the voice of Nat is raised in the Kitchen below me, and coming back to my sell I place a Candle in my Lanthorn.
As I came up into Lime Street the Skie grew dark with the Cold and yet here was an old Woman with a Child on her Back singing "Fine writing Inke! Fine writing Inke!".
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In 18th-century London, squalor vies with elegance as architect Nicholas Dyer is commissioned to build new churches in the aftermath of the Great Fire. CID Detective Hawksmoor, 250 years later, investigates a series of murders that have occurred on the sites of certain 18th-century London churches.

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Book description
Events in the life of architect Nicolas Dyer, assistant to Sir Christopher Wren, are seemingly mirrored in the present as a police inspector, Hawksmoor, tries to solve several murders in London churches. Shifting both tale and writing style between Dyer in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the modern-day Hawksmoor, the story is intricate and chilling.
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